Kimi K3 Release Splits Silicon Valley and Washington

Chinese AI company Moonshot AI released Kimi K3 on July 16, a model approaching frontier performance at a lower price with fully open weights. Within a week, the White House accused it of distilling US models, OpenAI's president acknowledged its capability, nearly 200 Silicon Valley startups petitioned against a ban, and Nvidia's CEO supported using Chinese models, causing a deep rift over open-source AI.