Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 to Rival Anthropic's Opus 4.8, Sources Say
Chinese AI lab Moonshot is set to release Kimi K3, a model with 2–3 trillion parameters that may match or exceed Anthropic's Opus 4.8. The company is also raising capital at a $31.5 billion valuation.
According to the Financial Times, citing anonymous sources, the latest iteration of Chinese AI lab Moonshot AI's Kimi model series is expected to perform at par with or even surpass Anthropic's Opus 4.8. Moonshot's Kimi K2 models have been well-received in the open-source AI market, ranking high on benchmarks and demonstrating capabilities close to the latest frontier models.
The upcoming Kimi K3 is said to take this further, narrowing the gap with closed-source models from OpenAI and Anthropic. FT reports that Kimi K3 will be the largest open-weight AI model from China, with a parameter count between 2 trillion and 3 trillion, and will be released "in the coming days."
Separately, Moonshot is reportedly raising fresh capital in a round that would value it at $31.5 billion. The company raised $2 billion at a $20 billion valuation in May.
This news comes amid a fresh debate on the value of paying AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic for their expensive, proprietary models. Industry leaders fear that these labs might extract data submitted by clients for use with products like ChatGPT and Claude. Executives are pitching their own products as alternatives or recommending companies to use cheaper open-source models from DeepSeek, Z.ai, or Moonshot, training them for specific purposes. The argument has gained momentum as open models from China close the performance gap with their more expensive, frontier counterparts.
