- Moonshot has launched a new AI model, the Kimi K3
- It’s surprisingly powerful, with the Chinese AI firm claiming it outperforms most American rivals with a few exceptions
- Kimi K3 is open weight by nature, which poses an additional threat to the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic
Moonshot, one of the emerging Chinese AI giants, has just unveiled a new AI model which is apparently up there with the likes of ChatGPT and Claude.
Bloomberg reports that Moonshot’s new Kimi K3 model could match the best the US has to offer, at least based on the company’s own benchmarking. Apparently it outperforms all rival AIs except for Claude Fable 5 (from Anthropic) and GPT-5.6 (from OpenAI).
Kimi K3 is a model with 2.8 trillion parameters, Bloomberg reports, and Artificial Analysis ranked it ahead of Anthropic’s Opus 4.8 on some benchmarks.
Moonshot also claims it beats Chinese rival Z.AI for coding tasks, and overall the new model’s performance has taken the market by surprise.
Moonshot notes in a blog post that the Kimi K3 is “the world’s first open 3T-class model, designed for cross-border intelligence across long-range coding, knowledge work and reasoning.”
Kimi K3 is available to use now. Bloomberg quotes Leonid Mironov, a portfolio manager at Gavekal Capital, as saying, “In my use, it’s clearly the best Chinese model ever,” noting that it’s no less “brilliant.”
Analysis: a weighty threat
This is a threat to the major US players in the AI market for several reasons.
The main difference with the Kimi K3 is that it’s what’s known as an “open weight” model, meaning anyone can get hold of the model to drive it for themselves – from July 27, when the weights are released – without paying anything. It’s not the same as open source though, as while you can get the model, what you don’t have to do is look behind the scenes at how the model was trained (and on what data).
The other caveat is that running the Kimi K3 requires some extremely powerful hardware; but nevertheless, the pre-formed model is available at no cost to companies that have the significant capabilities to do so. So you can imagine how this open-weight approach threatens the AI giants in the US (and it’s probably meant to go this way for the Chinese rival).
What will also be a concern for the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic is that Moonshot attacks one of the most lucrative aspects of AI, where Kimi K3 is being pushed for its coding skills. However, Moonshot charges a lot more than Chinese rivals for those who want to use it, and in fact is priced around Claude Sonnet levels, so on par with current cutting-edge (frontier) AI models.
That in itself is a signal of the quality on offer here and why the Kimi K3 has raised quite a few eyebrows. As the competition around AI heats up, there are also concerns about whether this means that safeguards will increasingly be overlooked in favor of faster development and progress (which has been a consistent source of concern for many, as it is).
Adding to all the controversy are allegations of AI theft that the US State Department leveled at Chinese firms earlier this year, including Moonshot.
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