China’s Moonshot and Alibaba released K3 and Qwen3.8, claiming performance near GPT-5.6 and Claude Fable 5 at lower costs, intensifying the US-China AI competition.
Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 is the largest open-weight model ever released at 2.8 trillion parameters, available under a modified MIT license. It signals that Chinese AI developers are circumventing US hardware constraints and matching frontier-class American models.
Moonshot’s Kimi K3 is the world’s largest open-weight model at 2.8 trillion parameters, ranking second only to Anthropic’s Fable 5 and signaling China’s rapid catch-up to American frontier AI.
Microsoft-owned GitHub adds Kimi K2.7 Code to Copilot model picker, marking the first open-weight model from a Chinese firm available on the platform. The move accelerates competition in AI coding assistants but introduces compliance considerations.