Kimi-maker Moonshot AI targets $2 billion in annual revenue
Moonshot AI, the developer of the Kimi model, has set an ambitious target to reach $2 billion in annualized revenue by the end of the year. This goal is double the company's current run rate and is driven by the high usage of its open-weight K3 model, which generates up to 300 billion tokens daily. However, the company faces significant controversy after Anthropic accused it of illegally distilling data from Claude models for its own training purposes.
- ▪Moonshot AI aims to double its revenue to $2 billion by the end of the year, driven by the success of its K3 model.
- ▪OpenRouter data indicates that K3 models currently generate as many as 300 billion tokens per day.
- ▪Anthropic alleged that Moonshot AI routed nearly 300,000 requests to Claude Opus to collect over 23 million responses for training.
- ▪Moonshot AI operates with lower margins than closed-weight competitors like OpenAI and Anthropic due to its open-weight model strategy.
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| Canonical URL | https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/11/kimi-maker-moonshot-ai-targets-2-billion-in-annual-revenue/ |
| Publication time | Fri, 11 Sep 2026 19:35:54 +0000 |
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In Brief Posted: 12:35 PM PDT · September 11, 2026 Image Credits:Lam Yik/Bloomberg / Getty Images Russell Brandom Kimi-maker Moonshot AI targets $2 billion in annual revenue One 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 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 currently shows as many as 300 billion tokens being generated each day by K3 models on the system.
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