Chinese artificial intelligence startup Moonshot has launched Kimi K3, a 2.8 trillion-parameter open-weight AI model that the company says is the world’s largest of its kind, intensifying competition between Chinese and U.S. developers in the race for advanced artificial intelligence capabilities.
The release on Friday highlights the rapid progress of China’s open AI ecosystem, with companies including Moonshot, Z.ai and MiniMax developing increasingly powerful models that challenge the long-standing view that Chinese AI firms remain several months behind their American counterparts.
Moonshot said Kimi K3 is the first open-weight model to approach the three trillion-parameter level and is designed for advanced reasoning, long-duration coding and complex knowledge-based tasks. The system includes a one-million-token context window, allowing it to process and retain significantly larger amounts of information during a single interaction compared with previous generations of AI models.
The launch comes a month after U.S. artificial intelligence company Anthropic’s Fable and Mythos models were withdrawn by the U.S. government over security concerns. The timing has highlighted the accelerating competition between China’s open-source AI developers and major American companies developing proprietary systems.
Moonshot said Kimi K3 achieved competitive results against leading U.S. models in internal evaluations. The company said the model performed competitively with Anthropic’s Fable 5 and significantly outperformed OpenAI’s Opus 4.8, GPT 5.6 Sol and GPT 5.5 in GPU kernel optimisation, a technical area focused on improving hardware efficiency and reducing processing delays.
Independent evaluations have also shown strong results for the model. Arena.ai ranked Kimi K3 first in a benchmark measuring web interface-building capabilities, while Vals AI placed it second overall behind Fable 5 and ahead of GPT-5.6 Sol. Artificial Analysis reported that the model delivered performance comparable to OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 and Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.8, particularly in tests involving complex, multi-step tasks.
The announcement affected shares of other Chinese AI companies. Hong Kong-listed Zhipu and MiniMax declined sharply following the release, with shares down 21.9% and 13.8%, respectively, by midday.
The launch reflects a broader acceleration among Chinese AI developers, who are shortening their model release cycles as global competition intensifies. The shift follows the release of Z.ai’s GLM-5.2, which attracted attention after achieving results close to top U.S. closed-source models in benchmark testing.
The growing competition is also moving toward increasingly large AI systems. MiniMax is developing a 2.7 trillion-parameter model expected to launch as early as the third quarter of 2026, while the company is also preparing its frontier-level multimodal model H3, according to previous Reuters reporting.
The push toward trillion-parameter models is driven by demand for AI systems capable of handling more complex reasoning and autonomous tasks. Major AI laboratories are also exploring systems designed for autonomous improvement, a process often described as recursive self-improvement.
Before Kimi K3’s release, Chinese AI models including Meituan’s LongCat-2.0 and DeepSeek’s V4-Pro had reached 1.6 trillion total parameters, while several other domestic systems had already crossed the trillion-parameter threshold.
Unlike closed-source AI systems operated by companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic, open-weight models allow users to download, operate and modify the underlying technology. Moonshot said Kimi K3 includes two major architectural upgrades aimed at improving computing efficiency and enabling long-horizon coding tasks with limited human supervision.
Moonshot, backed by major technology companies including Alibaba and Tencent, has expanded its investment and development efforts to remain competitive in the AI sector. Bloomberg reported last month that the startup was seeking $2 billion in new funding at a valuation of approximately $30 billion ahead of a possible Hong Kong listing.
With Kimi K3, Chinese AI companies are continuing to expand their presence in a global market increasingly defined by competition over model performance, computing scale and access to advanced artificial intelligence technology.
