Kimi-maker Moonshot AI targets $2B in annual revenue

One of China’s most prominent AI labs, Moonshot AI, believes it can turn its popular open-weight model into serious sales growth. According to reports, 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, reflecting the success of the K3 model since its summer release. 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 remains dwarfed by 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. Meanwhile, Moonshot’s model development practices remain controversial. Anthropic recently accused the company of a long-running model distillation campaign that routed nearly 300,000 requests from Kimi directly to Claude Opus. In total, more than 23 million responses were allegedly collected from Anthropic models for use in Moonshot’s training.