Moonshot AI, one of China’s most prominent AI research institutes, believes it can turn its popular open-weight model into significant sales growth. On Friday, Bloomberg reported that the institute is targeting $2 billion in annualized revenue by the end of the year. This is twice the revenue run rate the company reported in August. This is an aggressive goal that reflects the success of the company’s K3 model since its release this summer.
Although K3 usage has decreased slightly in recent months, OpenRouter data shows that 300 billion tokens are currently being generated daily by K3 models on the system.
Moonshot’s projected revenue still dwarfs the revenues of OpenAI and Anthropic, which were pegged at $40 billion and $65 billion, respectively, in recent reports. Because Moonshot’s model weights are available for free, the company’s profit margins are much lower than competitors with private weights. The rise in predictions shows that open-weight AI models can still be profitable, even if they are not as profitable as closed-weight frontier models.
Still, Moonshot’s model development practices remain controversial, if not outright illegal. Earlier this week, Anthropic accused the company of a long-running model distillation campaign in which it forwarded approximately 300,000 requests from Kimi directly to Claude Opus, essentially offering Opus in place of Kimi’s own models. In total, the company claims more than 23 million responses were collected from the human model for use in training Moonshot.
