Researchers call White House Kimi K3 distillation claim technically implausible

White House science advisor Michael Kratsios accused Moonshot of "Large-scale, covert industrial distillation" of Anthropic's Fable to build Kimi K3. Researchers push back: Fable was publicly available only since July 1, 2026 — two weeks before K3's release. AI2's Nathan Lambert says distilling Fable-level capabilities would require reinforcement learning with tens of millions of agents, a time and cost bottleneck via any frontier lab's API. Kratsios shared no evidence; Treasury did not define the "watermarks" Secretary Bessent cited. Moonshot plans to release full weights and training methodology by July 27, enabling independent evaluation.