Moonshot AI has released Kimi K3, a model that by early assessments matches Anthropic's Opus 4.8, built by a team of just 300 people. Even OpenAI strategist Dean W. Ball calls it "very good," but, of course, warns that a world dominated by open-weight models would amount to "AI communism." The release is reigniting the debate over how much computing power actually matters and whether U.S. export controls are working.

The FT reports Kimi K3 will be the largest open AI model from China, with a parameter count between 2 trillion and 3 trillion.

Moonshot AI released Kimi K3, a 2.8 trillion-parameter open-source AI model from China that rivals OpenAI, Anthropic and other top U.S. systems in frontier AI benchmarks.

By Tracy Qu and Raffaele Huang

Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 is the largest open-weight model ever released - 2.8 trillion parameters, a million-token memory, benchmark scores within touching distance of GPT-5.6 Sol,…