Kimi-maker Moonshot AI targets $2 billion in annual revenue

Chinese AI lab Moonshot AI, founded by one of the country's most prominent AI research institutions, is aiming to achieve $2 billion in annual revenue by the end of this year. This ambitious target is double the company's current revenue run rate for August, according to Bloomberg. The success of Moonshot AI's K3 model, launched this summer, is believed to be driving this growth.

While usage of the K3 model has slightly decreased in recent months, OpenRouter data suggests that up to 300 billion tokens are being generated daily by K3 models on the system. Despite the company's lower margins compared to closed-weight competitors like OpenAI and Anthropic, whose reported revenues are $40 billion and $65 billion respectively, Moonshot AI's ambitious revenue projection indicates that there is still potential for profit within the open-weight AI model market.

However, Moonshot AI's business practices have been controversial, with Anthropic accusing the company of a prolonged model distillation scheme. According to Anthropic, Moonshot AI routed nearly 300,000 requests from its Kimi model to Anthropic's Claude Opus, effectively serving Opus in place of Kimi's own model. This resulted in more than 23 million responses being collected from Anthropic models for use in Moonshot's training.