Stocks in Asia and the United States fell Friday after technological advances announced by a Chinese artificial intelligence company intensified concerns that the AI spending spree driving this year’s market rally could be at risk.
The announcement came from Chinese company Moonshot, which unveiled Kimi K3, its most capable AI model, and one it said closed much of the gap with models such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude.
Taiwan’s benchmark stock index closed down more than 6%, while markets in Japan closed down 4% on the news. South Korean markets were closed Friday for a national holiday. The Nasdaq dropped 1.5% Friday, while the S&P 500 fell 0.7%. The Dow was down 60 points, or 0.1%.
Moonshot said Kimi K3 is nearing the performance of cutting-edge models like Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5, resurfacing concerns about competition from companies in China.
Kimi K3 is the world’s largest open-source model, according to Moonshot. Open-source models can pose problems for US AI companies that are trying to charge subscriptions to access their closed-source models. That can also hurt the chipmakers that are betting on a continued AI spending spree.
