Moonshot AI is making headlines by releasing the weights of its massive Kimi K3 model for free download starting Monday, July 27. This move lets developers access, customize, and run one of the largest AI models locally without any cost.
Kimi K3 has an unprecedented 2.8 trillion parameters, positioning it as the biggest open-weight AI model globally. With a context window capable of handling a million tokens in one prompt, it excels at processing extensive texts or complex codebases in a single run. Moonshot claims that K3 matches or surpasses the performance of OpenAI's Fable 5, Anthropic's Opus, and various GPT-5 versions on numerous benchmarks.
The model’s launch shows how Chinese AI firms are rapidly advancing, achieving competitive results with far fewer resources compared to US counterparts. This trend echoes the earlier success of DeepSeek in 2025, highlighting the growing global reach of Chinese AI technologies. Despite rising popularity, major cloud providers like AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Vertex AI have yet to offer support for these open-weight Chinese models, which Bloomberg Intelligence analysts say will be key for widespread adoption and monetization.
Moonshot’s daily sales surged sixfold after K3’s debut, forcing the company to pause new subscriptions temporarily due to demand spikes. Having reached a $20 billion valuation in May following a $2 billion funding round led by Meituan’s Long-Z Investments, Moonshot is now eyeing a fresh funding round that could value it at $50 billion. Plans for a Hong Kong IPO may materialize before year-end, with founder Yang Zhilin emphasizing transparency and openness over closed proprietary systems as key to growth.
However, the company is under scrutiny in the US. A White House official recently alleged that Moonshot trained K3 using banned Nvidia chips and employed distillation a technique that extracts outputs from competitor models to enhance one’s own AI. Moonshot has yet to issue a response to these claims.
