Bitcoin, ether and every other major cryptocurrency fell on Friday, with many pointing to a Beijing startup that gave away a model that beat Anthropic’s best at writing code.
Moonshot AI released Kimi K3 on Thursday, and by Friday morning, AI and semiconductor stocks were selling off across Asia as traders dubbed it a “Kimi moment,” an echo of the DeepSeek shock that erased roughly $600 billion from Nvidia’s market value in a single session.
What Moonshot built is a 2.8-trillion-parameter model with a one-million-token context window, roughly four times the size of its previous version. It runs on a mixture-of-experts design, meaning it activates only a small slice of itself for any given task, in this case 16 specialists out of 896, which is how a model that large stays cheap to run.
Moonshot says architectural changes give it roughly 2.5 times the scaling efficiency of its predecessor, according to its technical blog.
On Arena’s Frontend Code leaderboard, K3 scored 1,679 against 1,631 for Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5 and 1,618 for OpenAI’s GPT-5.6, taking first place and ranking top in six of seven categories.
Moonshot’s own previous model sat at number 18. That is a 17-place jump in one release. On broader tests of general knowledge work, K3 lands behind the top Claude and OpenAI configurations rather than ahead of them, so this is a win in a specific domain, not across the board.
