Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 Launch Sends Rival Stocks Plunging

On Friday, Moonshot AI, based in Beijing, introduced the Kimi K3, an open-weight model with 2.8 trillion parameters. This model competes with leading systems from OpenAI and Anthropic, outperforming Claude Opus 4.8 and GPT 5.5 in coding and agent assessments. It boasts a context window of 1 million tokens and supports both text and images. Following the launch, Chinese AI stocks plummeted: Z.ai fell by 30%, MiniMax Group by 16%, and Alibaba by 4%. Bloomberg's Asian semiconductor index decreased over 6%, and Nasdaq 100 futures dropped 2%. Arena blind evaluations indicated a preference for K3 among developers for front-end coding tasks. Moonshot set the API price close to Anthropic's mid-range, avoiding significant discounts. Full weights will be released on July 27. This launch coincided with Chinese President Xi Jinping's first appearance at China's AI summit, where he called for global collaboration. Founded in 2023, Moonshot raised $2 billion at a valuation exceeding $20 billion in May, with support from Alibaba and Tencent.