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Moonshot ships Kimi K3, a 2.8-trillion-parameter open-weight model, and Chinese rivals crater

The largest open-weight model ever released beats Claude Opus 4.8 and GPT 5.5 on coding and agent benchmarks — and stops short of Fable 5 and GPT 5.6 Sol.

By Iris Holloway · Tools & frameworks ·

Beijing-based Moonshot AI released Kimi K3 on Thursday, a 2.8-trillion-parameter open-weight model the company calls the largest ever shipped, and by end of session Hong Kong-listed Z.ai had fallen 28.4% and MiniMax 15.6%. The rout wasn’t from a Western lab. It was from a domestic peer.

On Moonshot’s own benchmarks, K3 “performed competitively” with Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5 and “substantially outperformed” Claude Opus 4.8, GPT 5.5, and SpaceXAI’s Grok on coding and general agent tasks. Axios, cited by Quartz, reports Arena blind evaluations had developers picking K3 ahead of every top U.S. model on front-end coding and matching GPT 5.6 Sol in the general text category. Neither OpenAI nor Anthropic publishes parameter counts for comparable systems, per Forbes, so the 2.8-trillion figure is a marketing weapon as much as a spec.

The pricing signals the shift. Moonshot has set the API near Anthropic’s mid-range tier, a break from the deep discounting that defined prior Chinese releases. This isn’t a challenger courting adoption. It’s a lab that thinks it has pricing power.

“K3 raises the capability ceiling for China AI models, shifting the burden of proof to other independent AI labs,” Bank of America analyst Alex Liu wrote in a note. The equity move suggests investors read it the same way.

Moonshot, founded in 2023 and backed by Alibaba and Tencent, raised roughly $2 billion in May at a valuation above $20 billion; annual recurring revenue crossed $200 million in April. Full weights land July 27.

The political scoring is louder. Hours after the release, at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai, Xi Jinping told delegates that “We must seize this rare historic opportunity, encourage open source, openness, cooperation, and sharing,” and urged countries to “jointly oppose” overstretching national security claims in AI. Earlier the same week, the U.S. Commerce Department began licensing limited Nvidia H200 exports to China. Both governments, it turns out, spent the week loosening the same knot from opposite ends.

Sources