Chinese AI start-up Moonshot has unveiled a massive new artificial intelligence model it says can rival top American firms. The company launched Kimi K3, containing 2.8 trillion parameters, which serves as a measure of an AI's scale and processing power. Kimi K3's full capabilities – coding, knowledge work, and reasoning – will be known when it is released as an open-source model on 27 July. The sudden breakthrough suggests that China's tech prowess is rapidly narrowing the capabilities gap, upending long-held assumptions in the West that Chinese developers trail their American peers. Its arrival later this month will make it the world's first open-source model in the three-trillion-parameter class that can be freely downloaded, run and customised by outside developers. The release comes at a highly sensitive moment for the global technology sector, just weeks after the US government abruptly forced American developer Anthropic to temporarily withdraw its flagship Fable and Mythos models due to severe cybersecurity concerns.
Published: July 17, 2026 4:53 pm
Source: BBC — Read original