Moonshot AI

Moonshot AI was founded in Beijing in 2023 by Yang Zhilin, and the name of the model and app it makes is Kimi. Since the company name and product name differ, news coverage often mixes them up.

What sets this company apart is that it builds very large models while still releasing their internals openly. Anyone can download them and run them on their own servers, and their scale ranks among the largest of any open model. That's why services like Cloudflare and various AI clouds list Kimi among the models they'll run on your behalf.

This cuts against the assumption that "Chinese open models are cheap imitations." Kimi is genuinely among the models developers pick often, and it's particularly well regarded for coding tasks.

As of August 2026, the latest release is Kimi K3. It competes at the top of open-model benchmarks, and alongside it Moonshot AI released a swarm system that runs 100 agents in parallel. This is a company that moved early toward having work done by a "swarm" rather than a single model.

"Kimi just released a new model" — more precisely, this means the company Moonshot AI released a model under the name Kimi.