China's Moonshot AI launches 1T-parameter model, open-sourced at release

Chinese artificial intelligence startup Moonshot AI released a new open-source AI model on Friday, joining a wave of similar releases from domestic rivals as it seeks to reclaim its position in the competitive local market.

The model, called Kimi K2, features 1 trillion total parameters, with 32 billion activated parameters in a mixture-of-experts architecture, the company said in a statement. This enables enhanced coding capabilities and strong performance in general agent tasks and tool integration, allowing it to break down complex tasks more effectively.

Moonshot claims Kimi K2 outperforms other open-source options like DeepSeek's V3 and offers competitive features compared to U.S. models from companies such as Anthropic.

The release follows a broader trend among Chinese companies towards open-sourcing AI models – a contrast to U.S. tech giants like OpenAI and Google, which continue to keep their most advanced models proprietary.

Other Chinese firms that have released open-source models include DeepSeek, Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu.

(With input from Reuters)