Chinese startup Moonshot AI has announced a new model that closes the gap with the American flagship and outperforms OpenAI and Anthropic’s most capable systems on some benchmarks.
The company announced Friday that in overall performance, the Kimi K3 still lags behind Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5 and OpenAI’s GPT 5.6 Sol, but consistently outperforms other models tested.
According to Moonshot, the model outperformed Claude Opus 4.8 and GPT 5.5 on benchmarks including coding and general agents, models that rank just behind state-of-the-art systems from Anthropic and OpenAI.
This is China’s largest AI model to date, with 2.8 trillion parameters representing the size of the neural network.
“Despite persistent hardware/computing power constraints in China, K3 demonstrates that pre-training scaling combined with architectural innovation can still drive significant changes to China’s flagship model,” Bank of America analysts said in a note led by Alex Liu.
The release comes as the race for AI supremacy between the US and China intensifies.
China’s AI models are already attracting attention among Western companies because they close the performance gap with U.S. rivals and are cheaper to use than cutting-edge products from U.S. labs. US lawmakers are considering how to curb the growing adoption of Chinese AI models by their own companies.
China’s AI shock
Founded in 2023, Beijing-based Moonshot AI is one of China’s leading model builders.
Shares of Chinese AI rivals fell on news of the announcement. Zaiannounced a new model to much fanfare in June, but its stock price plummeted 28% on Friday. mini max groupanother Chinese model company also fell by 16%.
“K3 raises the cap on the capabilities of Chinese AI models and shifts the burden of proof to other independent AI laboratories,” Liu said.
Earlier this week, alibabaThe company, which makes the Qwen series of models, saw its stock price rise on news of its partnership with. apple In China. However, the stock fell 4% on Friday.
“For Alibaba, given the challenging computing environment, while benefiting from widespread AI training and increased usage of cloud services, Alibaba Quen’s ‘open source leader’ narrative may face some challenges,” Liu said.
