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

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ai-news moonshot-ai kimi-model revenue-targets open-weight-models business controversy

Summary

Moonshot AI, the creator of the Kimi K3 open-weight model, targets $2 billion in annualized revenue by end of 2026, reflecting growth despite open-weight model challenges. The company is also accused by Anthropic of using distillation from Claude Opus in training.

While K3's usage figures have declined slightly in recent months, OpenRouter data currently shows as many as 300 billion tokens being generated each day by K3 models on the system.
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# Kimi-maker Moonshot AI targets $2B in annual revenue | TechCrunch Source: [https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/11/kimi-maker-moonshot-ai-targets-2-billion-in-annual-revenue/](https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/11/kimi-maker-moonshot-ai-targets-2-billion-in-annual-revenue/) In Brief Posted: 12:35 PM PDT · September 11, 2026 ![The Kimi K3 app icon on a smartphone arranged in Hong Kong, on Tuesday, July 21, 2026.](https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/GettyImages-2286500505.jpg?w=1024)**Image Credits:**Lam Yik/Bloomberg / Getty ImagesOne of China’s most prominent AI labs, Moonshot AI, believes it can turn its popular open\-weight model into serious sales growth\. On Friday,[Bloomberg reported](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-09-11/china-ai-star-moonshot-eyes-2-billion-annualized-sales-in-2026)that the lab is targeting $2 billion in annualized revenue by the end of the year, double the company’s reported revenue run rate for August\. It’s an aggressive goal that reflects the success of the company’s K3 model since its release this summer\. While K3’s usage figures have declined slightly in recent months,[OpenRouter data](https://openrouter.ai/moonshotai/kimi-k3#activity)currently shows as many as 300 billion tokens being generated each day by K3 models on the system\. Moonshot’s projected revenue is still dwarfed by that of OpenAI and Anthropic, which recent reports put at[$40 billion](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-13/openai-s-revenue-run-rate-tops-40-billion-ahead-of-ipo)and[$65 billion](https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/17/anthropics-annualized-revenue-surges-to-65b/), respectively\. Because Moonshot’s model weights are freely available, the company has far lower margins than its closed\-weight competitors\. The rising projections show there’s still money to be made from open\-weight AI models, even if they’re not as lucrative as closed\-weight frontier models\. Still, Moonshot’s model development practices remain controversial — if not downright illegal\. Earlier this week, Anthropic[accused the company](https://www.anthropic.com/threat-intelligence-report-september-2026)of a long\-running model distillation campaign that routed nearly 300,000 requests from Kimi directly to Claude Opus, effectively serving Opus in place of Kimi’s own models\. In total, more than 23 million responses were collected from Anthropic models for use in Moonshot’s training, the company alleged\. ### Newsletters Subscribe for the industry’s biggest tech news ## Related ## Latest in AI

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