The latest iteration of Chinese AI lab Moonshot AI's Kimi model series is expected to perform at par with or even surpass Anthropic’s Opus 4.8, according to a report by the Financial Times. Moonshot’s Kimi K2 models have been well-received in the open source market, ranking high on benchmarks and demonstrating capabilities that aren't too far behind the latest frontier models.

The company's upcoming release, called Kimi K3, is said to take this one step further to close the gap with closed-source models from OpenAI and Anthropic. FT reports that Kimi K3 will be the largest open-weight AI model from China, with a parameter count between 2 trillion and 3 trillion, and will be released 'in the coming days.'

The news comes amid a fresh debate on the value of paying AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic for their expensive, closed-source models. Industry leaders fear that these labs will somehow manage to extract the data clients submit for use with their AI products.

Executives are pitching their own products as alternatives or recommending companies take cheaper open source models, such as those developed by DeepSeek, Z.ai, or Moonshot, and train them for their specific purposes. The race is on, but at what cost to data privacy?