Moonshot AI Aims for $2 Billion Despite Accusations from Anthropic

Moonshot AI anticipates an annual revenue of $2 billion by the end of the year, which is double the amount announced in August. This ambition comes as Anthropic accuses the company of having extensively used its models to train its own. Meanwhile, the K3 model, launched this summer, continues to generate high usage volumes according to OpenRouter, despite a slight recent decline.

Anthropic accuses Moonshot of siphoning 23 million responses

Anthropic claims that Moonshot AI conducted a long-term model distillation campaign, redirecting nearly 300,000 requests from Kimi to Claude Opus, thereby serving Anthropic's model instead of Kimi's models. According to Anthropic, over 23 million responses from its models were allegedly collected for training purposes by Moonshot AI. These practices are described as controversial, if not illegal. Moonshot AI is also behind the Kimi assistant.

Goal of $2 billion, with margins constrained by open weights

Moonshot AI plans to reach $2 billion in annual revenue by the end of the year, which is double the amount reported for August. This figure remains below the revenues announced for OpenAI and Anthropic, which stand at $40 billion and $65 billion, respectively. With the weights of its models available for free, Moonshot AI operates with much lower margins than its closed-weight competitors. Despite this, the growth in projections shows that it is possible to generate revenue with open-weight models, even if they remain less profitable than closed models.

K3 launched this summer, high usage but slightly declining

Moonshot AI's K3 model was launched this summer and continues to record significant usage, although the numbers have slightly decreased in recent months. According to OpenRouter, K3 models generate up to 300 billion tokens each day on the system. Moonshot AI, an artificial intelligence lab based in China, believes it can convert the popularity of its open-weight models into sales growth.