Senior White House official claims China’s K3 model stolen from Anthropic

Donald Trump’s Assistant for Science and Technology, Michael Kratsios, has accused China’s Moonshot AI of creating its head-turning Kimi K3 model distilling Anthropic’s Fable. Kimi K3 is 2.8-trillion-parameter open-weights model of such impressive quality that its mere existence suggests Chinese AI researchers aren’t far behind …

[Artem S Tashkinov]

Several top AI researchers have already chimed in and said this is not technically or physically possible.

[SundogUK]

Chinese researchers, or paid by PRC.

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps the handle SundogMAGA was already taken...

[Anonymous Coward]

Industrial Grade Intellectual Property Thief allegedly burgled.

Schadenfreude writ large.

[PhilipN]

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent...

Had an open mind on the topic until you mentioned his name.

[Charlie Clark]

Re: US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent...

Part of the "Donroe doctrine", apparently:

Scott Bessent, the treasury secretary, recently described as “economic statecraft in the 21st century”, in which global access to the dollar and the American economy is “no longer unconditional”

From The Economist last week: the rules-based order is over, you do what you're told or we'll cut you out.

Personally, I'd call this economic and diplomatic lunacy by treating friends and allies as potential adversaries…

[Pussifer]

Re: US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent...

Scott Bessent - the man that suffers from resting cnut face.

[sal II]

Re: US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent...

I don't need names. In my head I read "Senior White House official" as "Ignorant career lier" (at least during the current administration).

So I knew from the title it will be a load of BS

[Evil Scot]

They dont like it up them.

I wonder if the BBC was paid for any of their stolen content?

[amanfromMars 1]

Another 0day Vulnerability Exploited, Another Tantrum Delivered

Do you not despair, Simon Sharwood, El Reg APAC Editor, at reporting such predictable events as if new news rather than treating them like they really are ... rotten dishes of green cheese and sour grapes ..... whenever one cannot fail to recognise the stench of it surrounding them‽

Senior White House officials make ab fab fools of the USA again with claims China’s K3 model stolen from Anthropic.

Donald Trump’s Assistant for Science and Technology, Michael Kratsios, and US Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, throw their toys out of the pram.

[EricM]

"Distillation" is just training on Question-Answer pairs...

The questions come from the entity doing the distillation. The answers are AI-generated, so they are not even copyrightable. The distill-training with this information is done by the entity that formulated the questions.

Wonder where they construct "stealing" here...

What exactly was "stolen"?

[BinkyTheHorse]

Re: "Distillation" is just training on Question-Answer pairs...

The sum total of human knowledge and creative output available on the Internet, used to train most popular LLMs in the first place?

But hey, that's mostly from the plebs, so not like it counts, right?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: "Distillation" is just training on Question-Answer pairs...

So digging that out and sharing it is a bad thing thing? Shouldn't you be encouraging everyone, big and small, to join in this "distillation" from all of the big LLMs and giving back (the munged results from) what was stolen?

Which leaves the open issues that this CLAIMED distillation occurrence was by another big company, who won't be sharing, and one that happens not to be in the US.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: "Distillation" is just training on Question-Answer pairs...

The training data stolen in the first place by the initial AI company, why do you ask?

[EricM]

Re: "Distillation" is just training on Question-Answer pairs...

Yeah, but that part is supposed to be "legal" as per the AI company's arguments, based on the assumption that training is different from copying...

Which, curiously, adds another question mark to this "distillation equals stealing" statement, as distillation is just another form of training.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: "Distillation" is just training on Question-Answer pairs...

That is not the point of the question you are responding to, as well you know.

The appropriation of the training data by the US AI companies is one matter to be addressed. Correct.

But the point here is that the same US company that committed the act you (correctly) dislike is being used as a pawn by the White House official who is claiming that a different act of theft has occured. But by the "rules" that are sort-of being applied to the use of the US AIs this claimed "distillation" is perfectly ok.

[Bebu sa Ware]

We don't like it…

and we hate even worse there is nothing we can do about it. (As in "The US has already sanctioned just about every major player in China’s tech ecosystem")

One can only hope that this is purely theatre because if the US Administration does not appreciate the technological progress of the PRC ironically kicked into high gear by Trump's "policies", they will find that an unpleasant surprise awaits.

[svsc]

A thief that steals from another thief has 100 years of forgiveness!

[DrXym]

Photocopying

I'm sure you can "distill" knowledge from one AI to another if you know what to ask but I bet the distillation feels a bit blurry and vague like photocopy. It conveys the same information but it has captured errors, as if creases, paper clips or your finger were captured in the copy.

[Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck]

Based on no presented evidence, proof, or suggestions that said will ever be provided.

"We will NOT tolerate competition with our billionaire overlords and Pumpkin Fuhrer in the US of A, especially not from open source that doesn't even steal our revenue!"

-- White House Official Arse Kisser

[2141]

Decline and Fall

China is demonstrating it's imminent dominance in AI and robotics, and it is leading the moment with proposals for a global regulatory framework.

The USA is on the back foot, whining about a clever nimble adversary. No global ideas. America's answer is to take its ball home in a sulk. A vast strategic error when China is offering a ball to everyone!

[Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck]

Re: Decline and Fall

And to threaten and tariff anyone who won't go pout along with them... just wait until Canada signs trade agreements with China! Der Pumpin Fuhrer will finally die of a brain aneurysm or a heart attack when he hears that...

[ecofeco]

Nobody cares

Nobody cares when a thief complains.

[Alpy]

Is it cheaper?

Cheaper? Likely right? I'll take it ;)

God bless code leaks and poor security :rolleyes:

[rgjnk]

Bollocks

Throw a little bit of critical thinking at it and the claims fall apart.

Does anyone seriously believe that they could have done it - even if technically possible - given the tiny amount of time thats passed, the cost of access, and the limits on access, and that even if they somehow could that this wouldn't have been wildly obvious very early on?

I quite believe that we're talking about people who could and would steal anything to get an advantage but I suspect the truth is that they didn't, and that it's this that really scares those in the US.

It's not like there's any magic involved here unique to the US, it's clever stuff but the only real barriers are data, compute and money and all those are available to anyone motivated enough.

[Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck]

As per usual they have absolutely no evidence to prove it they're just trying to protect the revenue of their donors.