Chinese firm Moonshot has unveiled a new open-source AI model with capabilities similar to those of Anthropic and OpenAI – the latest sign that China is catching up to the US in the race to build advanced AI.
Dubbed Kimi K3, the large language model was trained on a massive 2.8 trillion parameters – the kernels of data that determine its responses to user questions, according to Moonshot. That would make it one of the largest AI models – if not the largest – ever released.
Moonshot, founded by Yang Zhilin, said its tests show the Kimi K3 was outperforming Anthropic’s Opus 4.8 model and OpenAI’s ChatGPT 5.5 when it comes to most coding tasks, the Financial Times reported. It is still less powerful than Anthropic’s cutting-edge Fable model, which was briefly taken offline in June due to concerns that bad actors could misuse it.
As an open-source model, Kimi K3 will be available for anyone to download and is expected to be far cheaper to use than the closed-source models offered by CEO Dario Amodei’s Anthropic and Sam Altman’s OpenAI. For example, Moonshot’s K2.6 model was about one-third as expensive as Opus 4.8 to use, according to the FT.
Kimi K3 was announced just weeks after China-based Z.AI released GLM-5.2, another open-source model with capabilities at or near those of leading American companies.
As The Post has reported, experts have grown concerned that ultra-cheap Chinese models are a major threat to the shaky business models of US labs known for charging top dollar for the “tokens” needed to use their chatbots.
If Kimi K3 proves as useful in real-world environments as it did in benchmark testing, it could raise questions about the widely held belief that America has a six to 12 month lead on China for the development of “frontier” AI models.
Moonshot could also come under fresh scrutiny as US officials and AI executives warn about China’s propensity to rip off technology through the use of unauthorized “distillation” – a technique in which a stronger model is used to train a weaker one.
In February, Anthropic publicly called out Moonshot and two other Chinese labs, Deepseek and Minimax, for allegedly using distillation to steal its AI technology. In June, Anthropic sent a letter to Congress detailing evidence that another Chinese tech giant, Alibaba, had distilled its AI models.