Moonshot AI.

In plain English

A Chinese lab, and one of China's six AI tigers, that makes Kimi, a family of very large AI models. You can use Kimi online, or download it as an open weight model and run it on your own infrastructure or machines, if you have the hardware (unlike ChatGPT and Claude, which you can't download and can only use through their makers' apps or approved cloud services). Like most of the big labs it's aiming for AGI. Its focus is on models that can hold very long documents in mind at once, models that understand the world through text, images, sound and video together, and, eventually, AI that can improve itself without people stepping in (see Recursive self-improvement). Alibaba is one of its investors.

Models to know

Kimi K3.1 Pro. Kimi K3 caused a stir when it launched in July 2026 because it showed a Chinese lab could release a model close to the best US ones, and let anyone download it.

Who's in charge

Yang Zhilin, founder and CEO.

Things to be aware of

Kimi's weights are downloadable, but its licence isn't fully open. Companies that sell access to it as a service and make more than $20 million a year from it must share up to 30% of that revenue with Moonshot. It's also huge, at 2.8 trillion parameters, so running it yourself needs serious hardware.

Anthropic has accused Moonshot of distilling its Claude models (see Distillation), and in July 2026 a White House official claimed Moonshot had used Claude Fable 5 to build Kimi K3. In September, Anthropic went further, claiming Moonshot had passed some Kimi users' requests to Claude without telling them and shown Claude's answers as Kimi's. Moonshot hasn't directly responded. It may cut both ways, though: US companies potentially build on Chinese open models too, and Cursor has reportedly used Kimi as the starting point for its own coding model.