The debut of Kimi K3 by Moonshot AI, rivaling models from OpenAI, has reignited the global AI competition debate.“>China brushed off allegations that the country distils foreign technology, after US firms including Anthropic PBC said Chinese rivals illicitly extract results from top American models to advance their own capabilities. “Some countries hype up distillation,” assistant Chinese foreign minister Liu Bin told participants at the World AI Conference in Shanghai on Saturday, without specifically naming the US. “This is misguided and counterproductive,” he added.
On Friday, Chinese President Xi Jinping also called for an open approach for global technology development, saying “AI development should not be a solo performance by a single country.”
The issue of distillation came into focus again after Chinese AI pioneer Moonshot AI launched a new flagship model earlier this week. Kimi K3 delivers performance on industry benchmarks that rivals top-tier offerings from OpenAI and Anthropic, sending stock markets reeling around the world like DeepSeek did when it first emerged on the global stage in early 2025.
In distillation, an older “teacher” AI model is used to train a newer, “student,” model that replicates the capabilities of the earlier system — often at a much lower cost than producing an original from scratch.
