Kimi-maker Moonshot AI targets $2B in annual revenue
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.
Kimi-maker Moonshot AI targets $2B in annual revenue | TechCrunch
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12:35 PM PDT · September 11, 2026
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Kimi-maker Moonshot AI targets $2B in annual revenue
One of Chinas most prominent AI labs, Moonshot AI, believes it can turn its popular open-weight model into serious sales growth. On Friday, Bloomberg reported that the lab is targeting $2 billion in annualized revenue by the end of the year, double the companys reported revenue run rate for August. Its an aggressive goal that reflects the success of the companys K3 model since its release this summer.
While K3s 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.
Moonshots projected revenue is still dwarfed by that of OpenAI and Anthropic, which recent reports put at $40 billion and $65 billion, respectively. Because Moonshots model weights are freely available, the company has far lower margins than its closed-weight competitors. The rising projections show theres still money to be made from open-weight AI models, even if theyre not as lucrative as closed-weight frontier models.
Still, Moonshots model development practices remain controversial — if not downright illegal. Earlier this week, Anthropic accused the company 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 Kimis own models. In total, more than 23 million responses were collected from Anthropic models for use in Moonshots training, the company alleged.
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