Chinese artificial intelligence lab Moonshot AI is targeting $2 billion in annualized revenue by the end of the year. Bloomberg reported the goal on Friday. The target doubles the company revenue run rate reported for August.
This aggressive financial goal stems from the strong adoption of the company K3 model. K3 launched this summer as an open-weight model.
Usage numbers for K3 have dropped slightly over recent months. OpenRouter data indicates that K3 models still generate up to 300 billion tokens every day on that system.
Moonshot projections remain far smaller than rivals OpenAI and Anthropic. Recent reports place OpenAI revenue at $40 billion and Anthropic revenue at $65 billion.
Moonshot model weights are freely available to the public. This business model creates much lower profit margins compared to closed-weight competitors.
The rising revenue projections demonstrate that open-weight AI models still generate substantial income. They achieve this despite trailing the financial success of closed-weight frontier models.
Moonshot development practices face significant controversy and legal scrutiny. Anthropic accused the lab earlier this week of running a long-term model distillation campaign.
Anthropic stated that Moonshot routed nearly 300,000 requests from Kimi directly to Claude Opus. This setup effectively served Opus instead of native Kimi models.
Moonshot collected more than 23 million responses from Anthropic models, according to the allegations. The company allegedly used this data for its own model training.
The next known step involves Moonshot working toward its year-end revenue target while responding to ongoing industry controversies and competitive pressures.
