Moonshot announced a $2bn raise at a $20bn valuation in May.

China is showcasing its AI prowess despite restrictive policy efforts from Washington, with Moonshot AI’s new Kimi K3 boasting a performance close to OpenAI and Anthropic’s latest models in various benchmarks.

At 2.8trn parameters, Kimi K3 is the largest open-weight AI model available on the market today. The multimodal model is designed for frontier intelligence across long-horizon coding, knowledge work and reasoning, according to its maker.

Across cited benchmarks, K3 trails behind only OpenAI’s new GPT-5.6 Sol and Anthropic’s Fable 5, while outperforming them in certain coding and general agent tasks. Kimi said that K3 performed “competitively” with Fable 5 and “substantially outperformed” Opus-4.8, GPT-5.6 Sol and GPT-5.5.

K3 is also the cheapest of the three cutting-edge models, at around $0.94 per Artificial Analysis intelligence index task and $15 per million output tokens. GPT-5.6 Sol (max) costs around $1.04 per task while Claude Fable 5 makes a significant leap to around $2.75 per task.

Although cheaper than the American juggernauts, Moonshot’s new model marks a major leap in price compared to its Chinese contemporaries. DeepSeek’s V4 Pro costs around $0.04 per index task, according to the same Artificial Analysis rankings, while MiniMax’s M3 costs around $0.12 for the same.

Moonshot unveiled its new model just months after announcing a $2bn raise from Chinese food delivery company Meituan’s VC arm Long-Z Investments, alongside Shuimu Capital, China Mobile and CPE Yuanfeng. The May round valued the start-up at around $20bn.

The launch marks the latest in escalating tensions between US and China over AI leadership. US curbs on semiconductor exports to China over recent years have pushed China to focus on its own chip capabilities, with Moonshot AI president Yutong Zhang telling an audience at the World Economic Forum earlier this year: “We knew we didn’t have the luxury to simply scale up compute … That forced us to focus on fundamental research and efficiency.”

The US is taking a more restrictive approach to sharing advanced home-grown AI models by only allowing approved bodies to access GPT-5.6, Fable and Mythos – much to OpenAI’s disappointment.

Lawmakers from the country, meanwhile, are also urging the Trump administration to ban US companies from buying memory chips from Chinese semiconductor developers.

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