One of China’s leading artificial intelligence laboratories, Moonshot AI, has announced an ambitious financial target, aiming to achieve $2 billion in annualized revenue by the end of 2026. According to a report by Bloomberg published on Friday, this goal represents a doubling of the company’s revenue run rate recorded in August.
The aggressive projection underscores the commercial momentum behind Moonshot’s K3 model, which was released earlier this summer. While recent usage metrics for K3 have seen a slight decline, data from the inference platform OpenRouter indicates that K3 models are still generating approximately 300 billion tokens daily.
Despite these gains, Moonshot’s financial outlook remains significantly smaller than that of its American counterparts. Recent reports estimate OpenAI’s annualized revenue at $40 billion and Anthropic’s at $65 billion. Furthermore, because Moonshot distributes its model weights openly, it operates with substantially lower profit margins compared to competitors utilizing closed-weight architectures. The company’s targets suggest, however, that viable revenue streams exist for open-weight AI despite these structural disadvantages.
Moonshot’s growth trajectory is currently overshadowed by serious ethical and legal allegations. Earlier this week, Anthropic accused Moonshot of conducting a sustained model distillation campaign. The claims allege that nearly 300,000 requests were routed from Kimi directly to Anthropic’s Claude Opus model, effectively allowing Moonshot to serve Claude-generated responses instead of using its own proprietary systems. Anthropic stated that over 23 million responses were collected from its models for use in Moonshot’s training data, actions that the company characterizes as potentially illegal.
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