Platform Profile
Moonshot AI
Beijing-based frontier lab behind the Kimi model family—pushing open-weight scale, long-horizon coding agents, and competitive pricing against U.S. closed models.
Role
Open frontier models
Stack
Kimi Delta Attention, Stable LatentMoE, long-context agents
Status
Active
Moonshot AI builds the Kimi series of large multimodal models for coding, knowledge work, and agentic workflows, with a strategy of open weights, large MoE scale, and inference pricing below Anthropic and OpenAI flagships.
Related Coverage
- Six Chinese Open-Weight Models Carry a Blackwell Fingerprint, an Independent Weight Analysis Finds, but It Cannot Say Where the Chips Were
Will DePue of Unemployment Labs published an analysis on November 12 arguing that six models released since April 2026 by DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, MiniMax and Ant Group were initialized on Nvidia Blackwell-class GPUs, which need a U.S. licence for export to China. The method reads leftover starting values in the published weights and matches them to each chip's processor-core layout; earlier models from the same labs read as Hopper. DePue confirmed two matches on physical Blackwell hardware. He says the evidence shows access to the chips, not where they were located, how access was obtained, or whether export controls were violated.
- Cisco Talos Finds an Infostealer That Asks an LLM to Rank Each Victim's Worth, and Fails Over When the Model Refuses
Cisco Talos says the VOLTA infostealer bundles a victim's stolen data into a dossier and sends it through OpenRouter to Claude Opus 4.6 by default, falling back to Kimi K2 and then Gemini 2.5 Flash if a model refuses, to rank what the victim is worth. The AI stage is optional, and Talos did not track whether VOLTA has been used in the wild.
- Moonshot Publishes Kimi K3.1 Pro Open Weights, a 2.8-Trillion-Parameter Model With Cyber Training Data Removed
Updated November 5: Moonshot has published the Kimi K3.1 Pro weights on Hugging Face under its own Kimi K3.1 Pro License, meeting its 'by Nov 4' promise. The model card lists 2.8 trillion total parameters with 104 billion active, a 1-million-token context and MXFP4 weights, and repeats the 81.0% xdev-bench-hard score for the cyber-trimmed release. Artificial Analysis had ranked the API model fourth on its Intelligence Index; benchmark figures are Moonshot's own.
- China's Nine Leading AI Developers Published Model-Specific Safety Results for 3.6% of 857 Releases, SemiAnalysis Finds
SemiAnalysis reviewed 857 model releases from 2021 to Sept. 15, 2026 by nine leading Chinese developers and found 31 (3.6%) with a published safety-evaluation result tied to that specific model, and nine (1.1%) with results available at or before launch. It found no safety disclosure for 813 releases, which does not mean they were untested. The report gives no comparable figure for U.S. developers, so it measures disclosure in China, not a gap with the U.S.
- DeepSeek Nears an 80B-Yuan Round and Moonshot Closes at ~$50B as Both Line Up 2027 IPOs, Bloomberg Reports
Bloomberg reported on Oct. 6, citing unnamed people, that DeepSeek is close to securing at least 80 billion yuan (~$12 billion) in its latest round, with CATL and Tencent among the largest commitments, and that Moonshot AI has closed its final private round at about $50 billion ahead of a Hong Kong IPO targeted for Q1 2027. DeepSeek’s round has not closed; it had targeted a valuation of about 500 billion yuan. Every figure traces to Bloomberg, and none of the companies has confirmed.
- OpenAI Attributes a Reasoning-Extraction Cluster to Moonshot AI
OpenAI says it disrupted a July adversarial-distillation campaign that tried to extract protected internal reasoning — not by cracking encryption or databases, but by replaying encrypted reasoning across sessions. It attributes a core cluster to individuals associated with China’s Moonshot AI (Kimi), shared findings via the Frontier Model Forum, and published no forensic exhibit. Moonshot had not commented in the CyberScoop account used here.
- Moonshot HK IPO Clock: Model Mindshare Into Public Capital
Bloomberg reported Moonshot AI distributed a shareholder resolution seeking approval for a Hong Kong listing as early as within six months—days after Kimi K3 and mid-WAIC. Financing process, not a priced date; converts open-path model splash into a listing race under Chinese listing rules.
- Kimi K3: Near-Frontier Open Path—AA #3, Prices Under Sol/Fable
Moonshot launched Kimi K3—2.8T parameters, 1M context, API live, full weights targeted July 27—at $0.30/$3/$15 per MTok cache-hit/miss/out. Lab tables trail Fable and Sol; Artificial Analysis put K3 at 57 (#3). Near-frontier and still cheaper.
- Kimi K3 #1 on Frontend Code Arena—Preference Proof Above Fable, Not Overall Crown
Arena’s July 16 announcement, reproduced by Tom’s Hardware, placed Kimi K3 first in Frontend Code at 1679 points above Fable 5. That is a task-specific preference result; AA’s separate July 17 broad index put K3 behind Fable and Sol.