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Chinese artificial intelligence startup Moonshot AI released a new open-source AI model on Friday, joining a wave of similar releases from local rivals, as it seeks to reclaim its position in the competitive domestic market.
The model, called Kimi K2, features enhanced coding capabilities and excels at general agent tasks and tool integration, allowing it to break down complex tasks more effectively, the company said in a statement.
Moonshot claimed the model outperforms mainstream open-source models in some areas, including DeepSeek's V3, and rival capabilities of leading U.S. models such as those from Anthropic in certain functions such as coding.
The release follows a trend among Chinese companies toward open-sourcing AI models, contrasting with many U.S. tech giants like OpenAI and Google that keep their most advanced AI models proprietary. Some American firms, including Meta Platforms , have also released open-source models.
Open-sourcing allows developers to showcase their technological capabilities and expand developer communities as well as their global influence, a strategy likely to help China counter U.S. efforts to limit Beijing's tech progress.
Other Chinese companies that have released open-source models include DeepSeek, Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu.