Moonshot AI

Moonshot AI is an AI company headquartered in Beijing, China. Its Chinese name, Yuezhi Anmian (月之暗面), means 'the dark side of the moon'. It was founded in 2023 by Yang Zhilin, who graduated from Tsinghua University and earned a PhD at Carnegie Mellon University in the US, together with fellow Tsinghua alumni. As of October 2026, Yang Zhilin is the CEO, and the company is a private company that is not yet listed on a stock exchange. Large Chinese tech companies such as Alibaba and Tencent have invested in it, and in October 2026 Bloomberg and other media reported that it was preparing to list on the Hong Kong stock exchange.

Its main service is Kimi, an AI chat service first launched in October 2023. Kimi can be used through a smartphone app, on the web and as a desktop program. The company has also released tools such as Kimi Code, which helps with programming. For developers, it offers an API (a channel through which other programs can call an AI model) and charges according to use, and it also sells business plans for companies and organisations. The company says its research is aimed at artificial general intelligence (AGI, AI that can do many different tasks the way a person can).

Moonshot AI has released large models as open weights (models published so that anyone can download and use them). Kimi K2, released in July 2025, is a 'mixture-of-experts' (MoE) model with one trillion parameters (the adjustable values inside a model); for each token (small piece of text) it processes, it uses only 32 billion of them. It was published under a 'Modified MIT License', whose only added condition is that commercial services with more than 100 million monthly users or more than 20 million US dollars in monthly revenue must display 'Kimi K2' on screen. Kimi K3, announced in July 2026, has 2.8 trillion parameters, understands text and images together, and can read up to one million tokens at once. K3 uses its own 'Kimi K3 License': a company that runs a business offering AI models to outside users (for example through an API), and whose revenue together with its affiliates exceeds 20 million US dollars over any 12 consecutive months, must sign a separate agreement with Moonshot AI before using it commercially, and very large commercial services must also display 'Kimi K3'.