Moonshot AI

Moonshot AI (Moonshot; Chinese: 月之暗面; pinyin: Yuè Zhī Ànmiàn; lit. 'Dark Side of the Moon') is an artificial intelligence (AI) company based in Beijing, China. It is one of China's six "AI tigers". Its Kimi K3, released July 2026, is the largest open weights model ever, at 2.8 trillion parameters. Founded in Beijing by Yang Zhilin, Zhou Xinyu, and Wu Yuxin in March 2023 at the outset of the AI boom, the company achieved a valuation of US$35 billion by July 2026, the second most valuable privately held AI company in China, after DeepSeek. Major investors include Alibaba Group and Tencent. Moonshot releases the Kimi series of open weights large language models, available via web, API, and the Kimi Code command-line agent. These are capable of multimodal image and video input, and their "Swarm" feature utilizes hundreds of sub-agents for deep research. Kimi K3's performance led the AI industry in China and rivalled frontier models from US companies OpenAI and Anthropic. Despite its open weights, K3's custom license requires revenue sharing of up to 30% for inference providers generating over US$20 million annually. Kimi models have been used as the basis or for post-training of US models, including Thinking Machines Lab's Inkling, Cursor's Composer 2, and Cognition AI's Devin AI. Throughout 2026, Anthropic accused Moonshot and other Chinese competitors of distilling its Claude models and covertly routing requests to Claude. From April, a US congressional committee pressed American companies over their use of Kimi and other Chinese AI models.