China’s Moonshot AI unveils Kimi K3 model it says rivals OpenAI, Anthropic
Chinese startup Moonshot AI has introduced a new model that it says closes the gap with leading US offerings and outperforms the most capable systems from OpenAI and Anthropic in some benchmarks.
The Kimi K3 still trails Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5 and OpenAI’s GPT 5.6 Sol in terms of overall performance, but consistently outperforms other models tested, the company said Friday.
According to Moonshot, the model outperformed Claude Opus 4.8 and GPT 5.5, which were right behind leading systems from Anthropic and OpenAI in benchmarks including coding and general intermediaries.
This is China’s largest AI model so far, with 2.8 trillion parameters indicating the size of the neural network.
“Despite persistent hardware/compute capacity constraints in China, K3 demonstrates that pre-training scaling paired with architectural innovation can still deliver step-change gains for flagship Chinese models,” Bank of America analysts wrote in a note led by Alex Liu. he said.
The statement comes as the race for artificial intelligence supremacy between the United States and China intensifies.
Chinese AI models are already gaining traction among Western companies because they are closing the performance gap with U.S. rivals and are cheaper to use than the most advanced offerings from American laboratories. US lawmakers are considering how to prevent the increasing adoption of Chinese AI models by domestic companies.
China’s artificial intelligence shock
Founded in 2023, Beijing-based Moonshot AI is one of China’s leading model manufacturers. Bloomberg raised $2 billion in May at a valuation of over $20 billion reported.
Supporters include Chinese technology giants Alibaba, which produces the Qwen series artificial intelligence models, and Tencent.
Shares of Chinese AI rivals fell on news of the exit. ZaiShares of the company, which launched a new model that caused a stir in June, fell 28% on Friday. MiniMax Groupanother Chinese model company, fell 16%.
“K3 raises the capacity ceiling for Chinese AI models, shifting the burden of proof to other independent AI laboratories,” Liu said.
Earlier this week, Alibaba’s He saw his shares rise with the news of his partnership Apple in China. But shares fell 4% on Friday.
“For Alibaba, Alibaba Qwen’s ‘open source leader’ narrative may face some tests as it benefits from broad AI training/usage growth for its cloud service given the tight computing environment,” Liu said.
