2026-07-27 — Beijing draws the line ⟨daily 2026-07-28⟩

• China vowed “all necessary measures” against the threatened US sanctions on AI firms over the Kimi-K3-distilled-from-Fable-5 accusations — tariff lines drawn ahead of the Sept 24 Xi–Trump summit. The state response the Watch line waits on has begun, on the trade axis rather than the export-control one. Critic-caught (benchmark miss, folded at 07-27 finalization). (Bloomberg)

2026-07-26 — K3 weights live ⟨daily 2026-07-26⟩

• Kimi K3 open weights shipped a day EARLY — billed the largest open-weight model ever, mid distillation-accusation and mid $50B pre-IPO push; David Sacks publicly pushed back on the “Chinese model” framing the same day.

2026-07-23 — The White House names a name

• OSTP Director Michael Kratsios directly accused Moonshot of distilling Anthropic’s Fable model to build Kimi K3 — the first time a senior US official has named a specific Chinese lab; separately alleged Moonshot obtained restricted Nvidia GB300 chips via Thailand. Treasury Secretary Bessent: “sanctions and the Entity List are both on the table.” Under Secretary of State Helberg called it a “heist of invaluable American IP.” (SCMP) ⟨daily 2026-07-23⟩
• Moonshot denies it — only 15 days elapsed between Fable’s July 1 release and K3’s July 15 launch; independent researchers (Redwood’s Ryan Greenblatt) call the evidence “thinner than official statements suggest,” circumstantial (K3 self-identifying as Claude at unusual rates has innocent explanations — scraped transcripts, leaked system prompts). ⟨daily 2026-07-23⟩

← Backstory

(Split out of china-stack-independence 2026-07-24 — see that thread’s 07-17→07-22 entries for the Kimi K3 launch/chip-selloff backstory this accusation follows.)