U.S. Treasury Secretary Bessent: China’s AI model Kimi stole technology and leaked PLA secrets

The U.S. political news website "Axios" reported that U.S. Treasury Secretary Bessent revealed in an interview that China's AI model stole the technology of the U.S. AI model, but the result was an embarrassing situation for the Beijing authorities: Kimi, considered China's most powerful AI model - "Dark Side of the Moon" (MoonShot AI) K3 sometimes claims to be the American AI model Claude; even more unexpectedly, it also handed over the Chinese People's Liberation Army's weapons program to Claude's developers, which in turn gave the United States a "big help."

Bessant talked about the AI ​​competition between the United States and China in the "Axios Show" broadcast on October 3, saying that one of the things he is most worried about in terms of AI is that the United States will be overtaken by China. When talking about the development of AI models, Bessant said that China's open source models will undergo "industrial distillation." This term is actually a good way of saying "stealing American models."

Bessant then named the Kimi K3 model of "Dark Side of the Moon" and mentioned one of the biggest flaws of the model. He said, "Kimi K3 thinks it is Claude developed by Anthropic in the United States. Sometimes Kimi will tell you directly that it is Claude."

Bessent also broke the news that Kimi K3 leaked China’s military secrets to the United States. He said: "This matter has been made public, so I can talk about it. Kimi k3 passed some of the Chinese People's Liberation Army's weapons programs to Anthropic, which was really a 'big help'."

Anthropic released a report on September 10 stating that in the process of distilling foreign AI by Chinese AI companies, internal secrets of China or Chinese companies were accidentally exposed. For example, a Chinese military user used the Kimi K3 model to analyze surveillance data. He loaded the surveillance data for a specific target person from the CCTV surveillance video library and asked Kimi K3 to analyze the CCTV data to understand whether the behavior of the person being tracked was abnormal.

The CCTV data includes surveillance footage from hundreds of cameras in Chengdu, including cameras outside Chinese People's Liberation Army facilities. As a result, "Dark Side of the Moon" transmitted this data to Anthropic's Claude model through an intermediary network and asked it to answer, thus leaking some confidential information of the Chinese military.