The US-China AI rivalry moved from benchmarks to accusations of theft this week, while OpenAI made two of its biggest moves of the year on the enterprise and infrastructure fronts. Here are the stories shaping the last 24 hours in AI.
White House accuses Moonshot AI of copying Anthropic’s Fable
Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, publicly stated that Chinese startup Moonshot AI distilled Anthropic’s Fable model to build Kimi K3, calling it “large-scale, covert industrial distillation” aimed at stealing US technology. It is the first time a senior US official has directly accused a specific Chinese lab of copying a specific American model. Independent statistical analysis showing K3 disproportionately identifies itself as Claude has added weight to the claim, though researchers caution the evidence remains circumstantial. Read more at France 24.
Treasury threatens sanctions as Beijing pushes back
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent warned that foreign companies found to have stolen US intellectual property could face sanctions, saying “we have the ability to sanction them because of this theft.” A Chinese embassy spokesman dismissed the allegations as “pure slander,” and some AI experts have questioned whether distillation alone could explain Kimi K3’s capabilities. The dispute lands just days before K3’s open weights are due for public release on July 27. Read more at TechCrunch.
Export controls under scrutiny over Nvidia GB300 claims
Alongside the distillation charge, Kratsios alleged that Moonshot acquired servers equipped with Nvidia’s restricted GB300 chips and accessed GB300 systems in Thailand, likely to train its models. If substantiated, the claim points to third-country routing as a workaround to US export controls, and is expected to intensify scrutiny of Southeast Asian data center and cloud capacity. Read more at Quartz.
OpenAI launches Presence, its enterprise agent platform
OpenAI unveiled Presence, a platform that connects AI agents to internal company systems with shared context, permissions, guardrails, and evaluations across voice and chat channels. Aimed at customer support, sales, and high-risk internal workflows, it is available through a limited general availability program, with BBVA, SoftBank, and IAG among early explorers. Read more at OpenAI.
Project Camellia: a $30 billion, 3.2-gigawatt campus in Georgia
OpenAI also announced Project Camellia, a 3.2-gigawatt data center campus on 1,400 acres in Effingham County, Georgia, with reported spending exceeding $30 billion. Georgia Power will deliver electricity in phases from 2028 to 2032, and OpenAI says it will fully fund the grid infrastructure so local ratepayers don’t subsidize the project. Read more at Axios.
What to watch: Kimi K3’s open weights drop on July 27, and the White House’s frontier AI framework is expected before August 1 — both could reshape how enterprises weigh open models against contested provenance.