Moonshot AI released its Kimi K3 model on Thursday, an open-weight system that outperformed leading U.S. models on a key coding leaderboard. The announcement sent semiconductor stocks and cryptocurrencies lower on Friday.
The Beijing-based company unveiled the 2.8-trillion-parameter mixture-of-experts model with a one-million-token context window. On Arena's Frontend Code leaderboard, Kimi K3 scored 1,679, ahead of Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 at 1,631 and OpenAI's GPT-5.6 at 1,618.
The model is scheduled for full public release on July 27. Its open-weight license allows anyone to download and run it without payment.
Bitcoin, Ether and other major cryptocurrencies fell alongside AI-related equities. Traders linked the moves to concerns that a capable Chinese model available at no cost could reduce demand for expensive U.S. infrastructure.
Moonshot AI said architectural improvements give the model roughly 2.5 times the scaling efficiency of its predecessor.
