Moonshot AI, one of China’s leading AI labs, aims to convert the commercial popularity of its open-weight K3 model into substantial sales growth. Bloomberg reported on Friday that the lab is targeting $2 billion in annualized revenue by the end of the year, roughly double the company’s reported revenue run rate for August.
K3 usage and metrics
Moonshot released the K3 model this summer, and the company credits the model’s adoption with driving its revenue ambitions. Although K3’s usage has declined slightly in recent months, OpenRouter data currently shows as many as 300 billion tokens being generated per day by K3 models on the system.
These figures indicate that open-weight models can generate significant traffic and commercial activity, even if margins are lower compared with closed-weight, frontier models.
Comparison with larger competitors
Even with Moonshot’s upward projection, the lab’s expected revenue remains small relative to industry leaders: recent reports place OpenAI’s revenue at about $40 billion and Anthropic’s at about $65 billion. Because Moonshot distributes its model weights freely, it operates with substantially lower margins than competitors that sell closed weights or licensed access.
Controversy over development practices
Alongside Moonshot’s revenue ambitions, questions have arisen about the lab’s model development practices. Earlier this week, Anthropic accused Moonshot of a prolonged model distillation campaign: according to Anthropic, nearly 300,000 requests from Kimi were routed directly to Claude Opus, effectively serving Opus in place of Kimi’s own models. Anthropic alleges that more than 23 million responses were collected from Anthropic models and used in Moonshot’s training.
These accusations raise ethical and legal concerns about the boundaries of model creation. At the same time, Moonshot’s revenue target reported by Bloomberg shows there is still commercial potential in open-weight AI models, even if they are less lucrative than the closed-weight frontier models.
Implications
Moonshot’s ability to reach the $2 billion target depends on converting K3’s usage into sustainable revenue and on the outcome of the allegations by Anthropic—whether they lead to legal action, technical restrictions, or reputational damage. The target signals a clear growth ambition, but Moonshot remains a much smaller revenue player compared with the large closed-weight model providers.
