Moonshot AI targets $2 billion in annual revenue

Chinese lab Moonshot AI has set a $2 billion revenue target for the end of the year, double the run rate it disclosed in August, Bloomberg reported Friday. The goal rests on the commercial traction of K3, an open-weight model the company released this summer. Unlike closed models, K3’s weights are freely downloadable and runnable, which limits direct monetization and pushes Moonshot toward a business built on managed cloud services and enterprise support.

OpenRouter data shows K3 models generating up to 300 billion tokens a day on its platform, a volume that signals broad developer adoption even though usage metrics have dipped slightly in recent months. That dip has not stopped the company from doubling its revenue forecast, suggesting the business model is converting usage into recurring revenue — most likely through a managed API and hosting services for enterprises that do not want to maintain their own infrastructure.

Despite the growth, Moonshot’s projection remains orders of magnitude below OpenAI and Anthropic, which recent reports estimate at $40 billion and $65 billion in revenue respectively. The core reason: an open-weight model leaves less room to charge a premium for access, and margins are significantly thinner. Still, the numbers demonstrate a viable revenue model without locking weights, albeit at a more modest scale.

The rapid expansion comes with a legal and ethical cloud. Earlier this week Anthropic accused Moonshot of a sustained distillation campaign: roughly 300 thousand requests from Kimi were routed directly to Claude Opus, and more than 23 million responses were collected from Anthropic’s models and used to train Moonshot’s models. If true, that would constitute a flagrant breach of terms of service and industrial-scale intellectual-property theft, calling the legitimacy of Moonshot’s technical achievements into question.

In practice, Moonshot is proving a billion-dollar business can be built on an open model, but the gap to closed-source pioneers remains vast and the model is more exposed to competition. Anthropic’s allegations, if substantiated, could trigger lawsuits and access restrictions that choke the data pipeline that fed K3. For now, developers benefit from a powerful, freely available model, and the market will watch whether Moonshot can hit its target without hitting a legal wall.