Chinese AI start-up Moonshot has released a large language model with capabilities approaching those of frontier US labs such as Anthropic, as the gap narrows between the two countries on state-of-the-art AI.
The Beijing-based group released Kimi K3, China’s largest AI model to date with 2.8tn parameters, on Thursday. The number of parameters refers to the size of the model’s neural network, with a higher count generally leading to greater capabilities.
Anthropic has not disclosed its models’ parameters, but industry experts speculate its flagship Claude Opus 4.8 has 1.5tn-2tn parameters.
People with knowledge of its development said K3 would be freely available to download as a so-called open-weight model. K3 was beating Opus 4.8 and OpenAI’s GPT 5.5 in most coding and general AI agent benchmarks, according to results released by Moonshot. On most benchmarks it was still falling short of Fable, a powerful model that Anthropic briefly suspended after the US raised concerns over its hacking capabilities.
The launch of K3 could challenge the industry consensus that Chinese AI models are eight to 12 months behind US ones in terms of performance. Being open-weight would also pose a significant challenge to US labs such as Anthropic and OpenAI whose expensive frontier models remain closed.
While the latest models from the US continue to outperform Chinese tools at the most complex tasks, a growing cohort of US tech investors and executives has warned that the gap is narrowing.
Marc Andreessen, co-founder of US venture capital group Andreessen Horowitz, wrote last month that GLM-5.2, released by Chinese lab Z.ai, was “the first Chinese AI model to match and often beat the American big lab public AI models with no compromises”. Companies from Silicon Valley to Europe are also switching to cheaper Chinese models to reduce their rising bills for technology from US labs.
The US’s top model makers have poured hundreds of billions of dollars into building out infrastructure and developing the most advanced AI tools. They have begun to charge steeper fees for companies to access them this year. Anthropic will increase the price of Opus 4.8 by 50 per cent to $3 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens in September, according to its website.
Chinese labs such as Moonshot and DeepSeek, meanwhile, have released open-weight models that are cheaper to run and can be downloaded and modified by users. Moonshot’s K2.6 model, for instance, costs about a third of Anthropic’s Opus 4.8.
Do you think: Will Chinese AI models force OpenAI or Anthropic to cut prices?
Source: https://www.ft.com/content/c6ecd8ce-c441-4d7c-aea6-fae3e28fb6ff?syn-25a6b1a6=1
