China accuses US of 'AI hegemonism', threatens countermeasures over potential probes

"For any action that causes substantive harm to Chinese interests, China will take all necessary measures to firmly safeguard its legitimate rights and interests," a ministry spokesperson said in a statement.

The comments mark an escalation in a dispute centred on Beijing-based Moonshot AI, whose recently released Kimi K3 model has drawn attention for its coding capabilities and intensified debate in Washington over whether Chinese developers are copying U.S. models or rapidly closing the technological gap through their own research. The controversy echoes the reaction in the U.S. to the rise of Chinese startup DeepSeek last year.

Anthropic said in February it had identified more than 3.4 million interactions with its Claude models linked to Moonshot. It said hundreds of fraudulent accounts were used to target capabilities including reasoning, coding, data analysis, tool use, computer vision and the operation of computers.