Moonshot's Kimi K3 aims to rival Anthropic's Opus 4.8 with 2-3T parameters

Chinese AI lab Moonshot AI is preparing to release Kimi K3, an open-weight model with 2 to 3 trillion parameters, according to the Financial Times. The upcoming model is expected to close the gap with top closed-source frontier models like Anthropic's Opus 4.8, and may even surpass it on certain benchmarks. Kimi K3 follows the well-received Kimi K2, which ranked high on open-source benchmarks and demonstrated capabilities not far behind proprietary models. If confirmed, Kimi K3 would be the largest open-weight AI model from China, potentially offering developers near-frontier performance without the licensing costs and data privacy concerns associated with closed-source products from OpenAI and Anthropic.

On the business side, Moonshot is reportedly raising fresh capital in a round that would value the company at $31.5 billion, a significant jump from its $20 billion valuation in May 2025 when it raised $2 billion. The news comes amid intensifying debate over the value of paying for expensive closed-source AI models like GPT and Claude. Industry leaders worry that AI labs could extract data submitted by clients for model training, driving enterprises to consider open-weight alternatives. Executives are now pitching models from DeepSeek, Z.ai, and Moonshot as cheaper, more secure options that can be fine-tuned for specific use cases. Kimi K3's imminent release could accelerate this shift.