Moonshot AI, a Chinese AI company, has set a target of $2 billion in annualised revenue by the end of the year. It would be about double Moonshot AI's reported revenue run rate as of August.
TechCrunch reported on Sept. 11 that the target reflects the performance of K3, an open-weight model Moonshot AI released this summer.
K3 usage has dipped slightly in recent months, but OpenRouter data show the K3 model in the system is generating up to 300 billion tokens a day.
Moonshot AI's projected revenue is far below that of OpenAI and Anthropic. Recent reports estimate OpenAI's annualised revenue at $40 billion and Anthropic's at $65 billion. TechCrunch said Moonshot AI has lower margins than companies with closed models because it releases model weights for free.
There is also controversy over how Moonshot AI develops its models. Anthropic claimed earlier this week that Moonshot AI carried out long-term model distillation and directly routed about 300,000 requests coming into Kimi to Claude Opus. It said Claude Opus provided responses instead of Kimi's own model.
Anthropic also claims that more than 23 million responses from its models were used for Moonshot AI's training.
Chi-gyu Hwang
delight@d-today.co.kr