Kimi: Threat or menace? | TechCrunch

Last day to exhibit your breakthrough to 10,000+ tech leaders at Disrupt is on Oct 2. Book Exhibit Table Now. Disrupt doors open Oct. 13. Get your pass and bring someone with you at 50% off. REGISTER NOW. Chinese company Moonshot AI released a new version of its Kimi model this week, leading to a perhaps-inevitable wave of discourse about China and open source AI. Moonshot said that although Kimi K3 “still trails the most powerful proprietary models, Claude Fable 5 and GPT 5.6 Sol,” the new open source model “demonstrated frontier-level performance across our evaluation suite, consistently outperforming other tested models.” Independent analyses from Arena.ai and Vals AI also suggested that Kimi is competitive with flagship frontier models. The announcement, which coincided with a speech from Chinese president Xi Jinping at the World AI Conference in Shanghai, seems to have spooked Wall Street, with the Nasdaq dropping about 1% on Friday as investors sold off stocks in chip companies like Nvidia. Many of the resulting posts from tech industry figures will sound familiar to those who remember the debate after another Chinese company, DeepSeek, released its open source R1 model in Ja