Moonshot AI, a prominent Chinese artificial intelligence laboratory, has set a target to reach $2 billion in annualized revenue by the end of the year. This objective represents a twofold increase compared to the company's revenue run rate recorded in August, driven by the performance of its K3 model released this summer.
Data from OpenRouter indicates that K3 models currently generate up to 300 billion tokens daily. Despite this activity, the company's projected revenue remains significantly lower than that of OpenAI and Anthropic, which are estimated at $40 billion and $65 billion respectively.
The business model of Moonshot AI faces challenges due to its open-weight approach, which results in lower margins compared to competitors using closed-weight models. The company's development practices have also come under scrutiny following recent allegations from Anthropic.
Anthropic claims that Moonshot AI conducted a model distillation campaign, routing nearly 300 000 requests from Kimi to Claude Opus. According to the allegations, Moonshot AI collected more than 23 million responses from Anthropic models to utilize them for training its own systems.
