- Moonshot launched a new AI model, Kimi K3
- It’s surprisingly powerful, with the Chinese AI company claiming it outperforms most of its US rivals, with a few exceptions.
- Kimi K3 is an open weight by nature, which poses an additional threat to OpenAI and Anthropic.
Moonshot, one of China’s emerging AI giants, has just revealed a new AI model that appears to be a match for ChatGPT and Claude.
Bloomberg reports that Moonshot’s new Kimi K3 model can match the best the U.S. has to offer, at least based on the company’s own benchmarking. Apparently, it outperforms all rival AIs except Claude Fable 5 (from Anthropic) and GPT-5.6 (from OpenAI).
Kimi K3 is a model with 2.8 trillion parameters, Bloomberg tells us, and Artificial Analysis ranked it ahead of Anthropic’s Opus 4.8 on certain criteria.
Moonshot also claims that it beats Chinese rival Z.AI for coding tasks, and overall the new model’s performance has surprised the market.
Moonshot notes in a blog post that Kimi K3 is the “world’s first open Class 3T model, designed for cutting-edge intelligence through coding, knowledge work, and long-term reasoning.”
Kimi K3 is available now. Bloomberg quotes Leonid Mironov, portfolio manager at Gavekal Capital, as saying, “In my opinion, this is clearly the best Chinese model ever,” emphasizing that it is no less “brilliant.”
Analysis: a significant threat
This is a threat to large US players in the AI market for several reasons.
The main difference with the Kimi K3 is that it’s what’s called an “open weight” model, meaning anyone can pick up the model to run it themselves – starting July 27, when the weights are released – without paying anything. This is not the same as open source, because even if you can obtain the model, you don’t have the ability to peek behind the scenes to see how the model was trained (and on what data).
The other caveat is that running Kimi K3 requires extremely powerful hardware; but nevertheless, for companies with the substantial means to do so, the pre-trained model is available for free. So you can imagine how this weight open approach threatens the AI giants in the US (and that’s probably the point of going this route for the Chinese rival).
What will also concern OpenAI and Anthropic is that Moonshot is tackling one of the most lucrative aspects of AI, with Kimi K3 being pushed for his coding skills. However, Moonshot charges significantly more than its Chinese competitors for those who want to use it, and in fact, it is priced around Claude Sonnet levels, so on par with current cutting-edge (frontier) AI models.
That in itself is a sign of the quality on offer here and the reason why Kimi K3 has raised quite a few eyebrows. As competition around AI intensifies, there are also questions about whether this means that safeguards will be increasingly neglected in favor of faster development and progress (which has been a constant source of worry for many).
Adding to all the controversy are accusations of AI theft leveled by the US State Department against Chinese companies earlier this year, including Moonshot.
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