Moonshot AI's latest open-source model, Kimi K3, is making waves across the global AI industry, with its release drawing attention from Silicon Valley, Washington, and Wall Street.
As the world's largest open-source AI model, Kimi K3 has demonstrated performance that rivals or even surpasses leading proprietary models such as Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 and OpenAI's GPT-5.6 on several major benchmarks.
Its stunning debut has fueled discussion over China's growing role in cutting-edge artificial intelligence.
Among the first to react was Elon Musk, who commented "Impressive" shortly after K3's launch before announcing that the next version of Grok "will soon surpass Kimi."
The exchange was widely interpreted as a sign that Chinese AI models are becoming serious global benchmarks.
Meanwhile, White House science and technology adviser Michael Kratsios accused Moonshot AI of conducting "large-scale distillation" of Anthropic's models.
However, supporters of Kimi noted that Anthropic's latest model was released only days before K3, raising questions over whether such claims are technically plausible.
The market also responded. Nvidia lost more than US$100 billion in market value following K3's release, though the decline was far smaller than the US$600 billion wiped out during the market reaction to DeepSeek earlier this year.
Notably, both Moonshot AI and DeepSeek were founded by entrepreneurs from Guangdong Province, underscoring the region's growing influence in China's AI ecosystem.
Reporter: Xie Hongzhou
Cameraman: Xie Hongzhou
Video: Xie Hongzhou
Poster: Xie Hongzhou
