Moonshot AI to launch Kimi K3 to rival Anthropic's Opus

Moonshot AI, the Chinese AI lab, is expected to release Kimi K3 “in the coming days,” according to the Financial Times, which cited anonymous sources. The upcoming model is expected to perform at par with or even surpass Anthropic’s Opus 4.8, the FT reported. Kimi K3 will also be the largest open-weight AI model from China, the FT reports — meaning its trained weights are publicly available for download and customization — with a parameter count (the number of internal variables a model uses to make decisions) between 2 trillion and 3 trillion.

The Chinese startup is also said to be raising fresh capital in a round that would value it at $31.5 billion. That would mark a jump from the $20 billion valuation it received when it raised $2 billion in May.

The launch adds to a fresh debate over the value of paying AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic for their expensive, closed-source models. Industry leaders fear that AI labs will somehow manage to extract the data their clients submit for use with their AI products like ChatGPT and Claude. Executives are pitching their own products as alternatives, or recommending that companies adopt cheaper open-source models — like those developed by DeepSeek, Z.ai, or Moonshot — and train them for their own purposes. That argument has gained momentum as open models from China close the gap with their more expensive, frontier counterparts.

Why it matters

The upcoming release of Kimi K3 highlights how open-weight models from China are rapidly closing the performance gap with expensive, closed-source frontier models from US labs, fueling a debate over the value of proprietary AI.