Chinese AI company Moonshot AI aims to increase its annual revenue run rate to $2 billion by the end of 2026. In August, the ARR exceeded $1 billion compared to $300 million in June, with the launch of the Kimi K3 model in July being the main source of acceleration. The company is also attracting funding with a valuation of about $50 billion and is considering an IPO in Hong Kong. Kimi K3 has 2.8 trillion parameters and has gained attention due to its test results and lower cost compared to several leading American models. According to OpenRouter, K3 models generate about 300 billion tokens daily. Moonshot AI is also expanding its work with corporate clients, including AsiaInfo Technologies and Kingsoft Cloud.
An additional growth area could be commercial cloud services. The Kimi K3 license terms require a separate agreement with Moonshot AI for commercial hosting if the company's total revenue exceeds $20 million over 12 months. According to Reuters, the startup is discussing a possible mechanism for distributing 30% of revenue with Microsoft, Amazon, and Google. In the Chinese market, Moonshot AI competes with Z.ai, whose ARR reached $1.6 billion in August, and MiniMax with a figure of $800 million. Meanwhile, American developers maintain significantly higher figures: by mid-2026, Anthropic's annual revenue run rate was $65 billion, and OpenAI's was $40 billion.
At the same time, Moonshot AI found itself at the center of accusations from Anthropic of covert distillation of Claude. Anthropic claims that the company sent nearly 300,000 requests to Claude over ten days through 5,380 fake accounts, and allegedly used some of the obtained data to train its own models. From May to July, Anthropic counted over 23 million exchanges, which it linked to the alleged distillation by Moonshot AI. The American company also stated that sensitive client information might have been among the transmitted requests. Separately, Kimi K3 was checked by cybersecurity specialists: researchers reported the possibility of executing commands in Telegram and using a test infrastructure error to access the internet. However, they emphasized that it was not about hacking third-party systems.
Related articles
