The Trump administration is reportedly divided over how to respond to rapidly advancing Chinese artificial intelligence models, with parts of the White House pushing for stricter controls while the Commerce Department views such restrictions as unworkable. The dispute has intensified after China's Moonshot AI released its Kimi K3 model, which rivals leading US systems from Anthropic and OpenAI, raising concerns in Washington about both economic competition and security risks posed by freely downloadable Chinese "open weight" models with few safeguards.

Senior White House officials have been discussing measures to curb "distillation", the practice of training new models using data from existing US ones, after Anthropic alleged Chinese firm Alibaba carried out its "largest known distillation attack" to date. The White House said Moonshot had built Kimi K3 partly by distilling Anthropic's technology, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent suggested such covert distillation could amount to intellectual property theft and warrant sanctions. Some form of presidential action is expected, though not an executive order, while Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has separately explored incentives for US labs to develop their own open-weight models to counter China's rise.