One of China's most prominent AI labs, Moonshot AI, believes it can turn its popular open-weight model into serious sales growth. On Friday, Bloomberg reported that the lab is targeting $2 billion in annualized revenue by the end of the year, double the company's reported revenue run rate for August. It's an aggressive goal that reflects the success of the company's K3 model since its release this summer. While K3's usage figures have declined slightly in recent months, OpenRouter data currently shows as many as 300 billion tokens being generated each day by K3 models on the system.
Moonshot's projected revenue is still dwarfed by that of OpenAI and Anthropic, which recent reports put at $40 billion and $65 billion , respectively. Because Moonshot's model weights are freely available, the company has far lower margins than its closed-weight competitors. The rising projections show there's still money to be made from open-weight AI models, even if they're not as lucrative as closed-weight frontier models. Still, Moonshot's model development practices remain controversial — if not downright illegal.
Earlier this week, Anthropic accused the company of a long-running model distillation campaign that routed nearly 300,000 requests from Kimi directly to Claude Opus, effectively serving Opus in place of Kimi's own models. In total, more than 23 million responses were collected from Anthropic models for use in Moonshot's training, the company alleged. The startup community will gather to answer a pivotal question: How do you build sustainably in the AI era? Every weekday and Sunday, you can get the best of TechCrunch’s coverage. TechCrunch Mobility is your destination for transportation news and insight.
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