Moonshot AI launches upgraded Kimi model

Chinese artificial intelligence startup Moonshot AI has launched an upgraded Kimi model, which boasts stronger coding, financial research and 3D design capabilities, while deliberately limiting its ability to carry out cyberattacks.

Kimi K3.1 Pro debuted fourth on independent evaluator Artificial Analysis' Intelligence Index, scoring 55 points, up 11 from its predecessor. It would become the highest-ranked open-weight model on the index once its weights are published, the evaluator said.

The first model in Moonshot's K3.1 series is available through its Kimi apps, coding tools and developer platforms. The company plans to release its full weights — the files developers need to run the model themselves — by Nov 4.

The model has 2.8 trillion parameters, with about 104 billion activated for each token processed. Its one-million-token context window allows it to handle large volumes of information in a single session.

Moonshot said the upgrade was built through further training of Kimi K3, with improvements aimed at completing practical tasks — from building software and creating 3D assets to analyzing financial documents and carrying out extended, multistep assignments.

The company also removed cybersecurity-related data from parts of its training pipeline, including reinforcement-learning environments, while retaining general programming tasks.

"We aim not to release open weights that would extend the absolute frontier of cyber capability," Moonshot said.

On its internal test of vulnerability discovery and exploitation, the K3.1 Pro scored 81.0 percent, compared with 90.5 percent for a comparable version without such safeguards. These figures were self-reported by the company.

Moonshot nevertheless reported competitive general coding performance. In its evaluation using Terminal-Bench 4.0 — which tests agents' ability to carry out practical computing tasks — K3.1 Pro scored 65.7 percent, ahead of OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra at 58.2 percent and just behind Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 at 66.4 percent.

The launch comes as Moonshot prepares to tap public markets. Bloomberg reported this month that the Beijing-based firm had completed a private funding round valuing it at about $50 billion and was targeting a Hong Kong debut in the first quarter of 2027, citing people familiar with the matter.

According to a report from Bloomberg Intelligence, China's top AI models have narrowed the performance gap with their United States' rivals to around 3 percent, the lowest on record.

Bloomberg Intelligence senior analyst Robert Lea said that the speed of the catching-up process raises fresh questions over how long the US can maintain its technological lead, and could help Chinese AI firms capture a larger share of the global market.

Stanford's 2026 AI Index said the performance gap between the top US and Chinese models had "effectively closed". As of March, the best US model was still ahead, but only by 2.7 percent, and models from the two countries had traded places at the top of rankings several times since early 2025.

Zhang Yaqin, founding dean of Tsinghua University's Institute for AI Industry Research, said that Chinese models have entered the global top tier, while China is increasingly carving out its own path in areas such as model efficiency, open-source development and industrial applications.

Tang Jie, a Tsinghua University computer science professor, said China still needs to catch up in high-end computing chips, fundamental AI architecture and the broader technology ecosystem, while producing more breakthroughs that originate in China rather than improving on existing approaches.

chengyu@chinadaily.com.cn