Alibaba-backed Moonshot releases Kimi K2 AI rivaling ChatGPT, Claude

BEIJING — The latest Chinese generative artificial intelligence model to take on OpenAI’s ChatGPT is offering coding capabilities — at a lower price.

Alibaba-backed startup Moonshot released on late Friday night its Kimi K2 model: a low-cost, open source large language model — the two factors that underpinned China-based DeepSeek’s industry disruption in January. Open-source technology provides source code access for free, an approach that few U.S. tech giants have taken, other than Meta and Google to some extent.

Coincidentally, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced early Saturday that there would be an indefinite delay of its first open-source model yet again due to safety concerns. OpenAI did not immediately respond to a CNBC request for comment on Kimi K2.

One of Kimi K2’s strengths is in writing computer code for applications, an area in which businesses see potential to reduce or replace staff with generative AI. OpenAI’s U.S. rival Anthropic focused on coding with its Claude Opus 4 model released in late May.

In its release announcement on social media platforms X and GitHub, Moonshot claimed Kimi K2 surpassed Claude Opus 4 on two benchmarks, and had better overall performance than OpenAI’s coding-focused GPT-4.1 model, based on several industry metrics.

“No doubt [Kimi K2 is] a globally competitive model, and it’s open sourced,” Wei Sun, principal analyst in artificial intelligence at Counterpoint, said in an email Monday.

“On top of that, it has lower token costs, making it attractive for large-scale or budget-sensitive deployments,” she said.

The new K2 model is available via Kimi’s app and browser interface for free unlike ChatGPT or Claude, which charge monthly subscriptions for their latest AI models.

Kimi is also only charging 15 cents for every 1 million input tokens, and $2.50 per 1 million output tokens, according to its website. Tokens are a way of measuring data for AI model processing.

In contrast, Claude Opus 4 charges 100 times more for input — $15 per million tokens — and 30 times more for output — $75 per million tokens. Meanwhile, for every one million tokens, GPT-4.1 charges $2 for input and $8 for output.

Moonshot AI said on GitHub that developers can use K2 however they wish, with the only requirement that they display “Kimi K2” on the user interface if the commercial product or service has more than 100 million monthly active users, or makes the equivalent of $20 million in monthly revenue.

Initial reviews of K2 on both English and Chinese social media have largely been positive, although there are some reports of hallucinations, a prevalent issue in generative AI, in which the models make up information.

Still, K2 is “the first model I feel comfortable using in production since Claude 3.5 Sonnet,” Pietro Schirano, founder of startup MagicPath that offers AI tools for design, said in a post on X.

Moonshot has open sourced some of its prior AI models. The company’s chatbot surged in popularity early last year as China’s alternative to ChatGPT, which isn’t officially available in the country. But similar chatbots from ByteDance and Tencent have since crowded the market, while tech giant Baidu has revamped its core search engine with AI tools.

Kimi’s latest AI release comes as investors eye Chinese alternatives to U.S. tech in the global AI competition.

Still, despite the excitement about DeepSeek, the privately-held company has yet to announce a major upgrade to its R1 and V3 model. Meanwhile, Manus AI, a Chinese startup that emerged earlier this year as another DeepSeek-type upstart, has relocated its headquarters to Singapore.

Over in the U.S., OpenAI also has yet to reveal GPT-5.

Work on GPT-5 may be taking up engineering resources, preventing OpenAI from progressing on its open-source model, Counterpoint’s Sun said, adding that it’s challenging to release a powerful open-source model without undermining the competitive advantage of a proprietary model.

Kimi K2 is not the company’s only recent release. Moonshot launched a Kimi research model last month and claimed it matched Google’s Gemini Deep Research ‘s 26.9 score and beat OpenAI’s version on a benchmark called “Humanity’s Last Exam.”

The Kimi research model even got a mention last week during Elon Musk’s xAI release of Grok 4 — which scored 25.4 on its own on the “Humanity’s Last Exam” benchmark, but attained a 44.4 score when allowed to use a variety of AI tools and web search.

“Kimi-Researcher represents a paradigm shift in agentic AI,” said Winston Ma, adjunct professor at NYU School of Law. He was referring to AI’s capability of simultaneously making several decisions on its own to complete a complex task.

“Instead of merely generating fluent responses, it demonstrates autonomous reasoning at an expert level — the kind of complex cognitive work previously missing from LLMs,” Ma said. He is also author of “The Digital War: How China’s Tech Power Shapes the Future of AI, Blockchain and Cyberspace.”

— CNBC’s Victoria Yeo contributed to this report.