WASHINGTON, July 21 -- Scott Bessent, the US Treasury secretary, said Tuesday that the Trump administration was prepared to impose sanctions on China if evidence confirmed that Chinese artificial intelligence developers had trained their models on stolen American intellectual property. The warning arrived three days after Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 model attracted international attention for performance metrics that independent researchers say outpace what its publicly disclosed computing resources should theoretically produce.

Bessent made the remarks in an interview with CNBC, saying the administration was scrutinizing open-source AI models for intellectual property violations. The specific concern, as articulated by Treasury, is that Chine...