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Fortune: Beijing startup’s Kimi K3 model challenges Claude and ChatGPT

techJul 18, 202686243

Beijing startup Moonshot on Friday unveiled Kimi K3, a new open-weight large language model that Fortune says appears to be catching up to Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Arena co-founder and CEO Anastasios Angelopoulos called the release "the single biggest release of the year" after Kimi K3 topped Arena’s ranking for "front-end coding capability." Bank of America analysts reported Kimi K3’s usage price is the highest for a Chinese model yet but roughly half the cost of OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol. Moonshot is run by an entrepreneur described as a Pink Floyd fan who earned a doctorate in Pittsburgh and is a partner with Huawei, though Moonshot has not disclosed what hardware it used to build K3. The unveiling came just before Chinese President Xi Jinping’s opening address to the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai, where Huawei also showed an Atlas 950 SuperPoD system. U.S. firms including Anthropic have accused some Chinese labs of illicitly extracting capabilities through distillation, a charge Beijing calls groundless; analyst Patrick Moorhead warned the market reaction may be an overreaction similar to last year’s DeepSeek release. If Kimi K3’s performance claims hold, the model strengthens evidence that Chinese open-source offerings are narrowing the gap with top U.S. models and increases pressure on U.S. AI firms and investors to reassess pricing and product strategies.

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