U.S. Investigates Chinese AI Companies, Google Cloud Revenue Rises 82%, Anthropic’s Unusual IPO Plan

**Akash Pasricha** (0:13)
Welcome, everyone, to The Information's TITV. My name is Akash Pasricha. It is Thursday, July 23rd. Today on the show, the federal government is looking into whether Moonshot AI is using advanced American-made chips. We'll talk to The Information's tech and politics reporter, Leo Schwartz, who broke that story. We've then got some quarterly results to unpack. Google and Tesla reported it was CapEx galore. Investors in both companies were unnerved. We'll talk about both those earnings calls shortly. We'll then unpack our reporting on Stripe's latest financials. And to close out the show, we've got a closer look at Anthropic's unusual stock plan for its employees ahead of its public debut, that we are anticipating to come very soon in the months to go. It's going to be a great show, so let's get right on into it.
The Information has exclusive reporting that the US government is looking into whether or not Moonshot AI, the maker of Kimi K3, is using top AI chips from American companies. US chip exports have, of course, been a highly regulated issue for years now. I want to bring on Leo Schwartz, our AI and politics reporter, to unpack his reporting for us.
Leo, welcome back to the show. It's great to have you here.

**Leo Schwartz** (1:29)
Thanks for having me.

**Akash Pasricha** (1:30)
My shirt.

**Leo Schwartz** (1:31)
You too.

**Akash Pasricha** (1:33)
Mine's half-sleeved though. It's a summer linen and the summer of tech policy, indeed, in the land of AI. What do we know about what the US is investigating with respect to chips and Moonshot AI?

**Leo Schwartz** (1:47)
It's the summer of the open-source battle over AI.
As you know, there's been weeks of speculation about whether DC and the Trump administration is going to crack down on this rise of Chinese open-source. A lot of people are worried that labs like Moonshot, which develops Kimi, are creating these models that will challenge Anthropic and open AI. And there's been a lot of uncertainty about what the White House response will actually be. Will there be a ban of these Chinese models? Will there be restrictions? Yesterday was really the first shot by a Trump administration official, Michael Kratios, who's the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, did this pretty shocking post on Twitter, or X, I should say, where he accused Moonshot of distilling or essentially stealing Anthropic's information to train its model.
What we discovered in our own reporting is that behind the scenes, the Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security, which basically handles all export controls of sensitive technologies, has been investigating this issue of basically whether Moonshot, a Chinese company and other Chinese companies, have been illegally or improperly using US advanced chips from companies like Nvidia to train their models. But there's an interesting layer to this story, which is that when Michael Kratios made his post, he wasn't doing so with information from Commerce and their investigation. The investigation is still ongoing. We report if Commerce is going to take any action, it would need to be completed. And basically the upshot of all of this is that there's a lot of division within the Trump administration on how to handle it. There's a lot of confusion even in between the different agencies on how to act.

**Akash Pasricha** (3:31)
And sorry, Kratios' tweet, it was that they had evidence that they were distilling or that he thinks that maybe they were distilling.

**Leo Schwartz** (3:38)
So Kratios was pretty clear. It said, we have information.

**Yueqi Yang** (3:42)
We have information. Okay. Moonshot is distilling in front of it.

**Akash Pasricha** (3:45)
It would be separate information then presumably from the information that you are citing in your own reporting. So we've got sort of two different lanes here of the government pursuing this issue.

**Leo Schwartz** (3:57)
Yeah. So this information would come from the Bureau of Industry and Security Under Commerce, which does investigate expert control violations. But the information that Kratios was going with was not from BIS.

**Akash Pasricha** (4:11)
Right.
So let's just talk about the consequences here. So if it does come to be found that Moonshot AI was using chips that they were not allowed to be using, these would presumably be the chips above and beyond the threshold of, we know that expert controls have been a big topic. The H200s were sort of the most advanced chip that they were allowed to sell. So we don't know exactly what chips they are investigating them using. But if it gets found that they were using it, then what happens? What's the consequence?

**Leo Schwartz** (4:45)
Yeah. So Kratios at least accused Moonshot of using these more advanced Nvidia chips through Thailand. As our colleagues have reported, there are these intricate chip smuggling rings, or at least ways for Chinese companies to try and circumvent those restrictions.