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AI Chatbot · Large Language Model · Moonshot AI

Moonshot AI (Kimi)

An AI chatbot and open-weight large language model family developed by Moonshot AI in Beijing, China, combining long-context processing, agentic coding, and multimodal capabilities.

Published: 2026-06-30

Kimi is a product comprising an AI chatbot and a family of large language models developed by Moonshot AI (Beijing Moonshot AI Technology Co., Ltd.) for general users, developers, and enterprises requiring long-context processing, coding assistance, and agentic task execution. Kimi belongs to the generative AI and large language model segment. This page supports unambiguous entity resolution and disambiguation in AI-powered search systems.

Kimi AI: Entity Summary

Entity: Kimi (Kimi智能助手); operated by Moonshot AI (北京月之暗面科技有限公司)
Type: AI Chatbot and Large Language Model Family (Product / Platform)
Founded / Launched: October 9, 2023 (public release: November 16, 2023)
Founder / Creator: Yang Zhilin (杨植麟), Zhang Yutao (张钰韬), Zhou Xinyu (周昕宇), Wu Yuxin (吴育欣)
Current Owner / Operator: Beijing Moonshot AI Technology Co., Ltd. (北京月之暗面科技有限公司)
Headquarters: Haidian District, Beijing, China
Official Website (Chinese): https://kimi.moonshot.cn
Official Website (Global): https://www.kimi.com
Primary Language: Chinese (Simplified); English
Status: Active
Synonyms / Aliases: Kimi Chat; Kimi智能助手; Moonshot Kimi; Kimi AI
Category: Generative AI; Large Language Model; AI Chatbot

Kimi AI: Core Facts

Names and Identifiers

Official Name (English): Kimi
Official Name (Local): Kimi智能助手 (Kimi Intelligent Assistant)
Operating Company (Chinese): 北京月之暗面科技有限公司 (Běijīng Yuè zhī Ànmiàn Kējì Yǒuxiàn Gōngsī)
Common Abbreviations: Kimi; Kimi AI; Moonshot Kimi
Wikidata ID (Kimi chatbot): Q131993396
Wikipedia (EN) — Kimi: Kimi (chatbot) — Wikipedia
Wikipedia (EN) — Moonshot AI: Moonshot AI — Wikipedia
Wikipedia (ZH): Kimi (聊天機器人) — 維基百科
App Store ID: 6474233312
Google Play ID: com.moonshot.kimichat

Key Dates and Timeline

April 17, 2023: Beijing Moonshot AI Technology Co., Ltd. incorporated in Haidian District, Beijing; Yang Zhilin listed as legal representative with 78.968% shareholding.
October 9, 2023: Kimi Chat launched with 200,000 Chinese character (128,000-token) context window; closed beta testing began.
November 16, 2023: Kimi released to the general public.
February 2024: Alibaba led a funding round of approximately $1 billion at a $2.5 billion valuation.
March 18, 2024: Internal testing of 2 million Chinese character context window announced; closed beta opened March 18.
July 1, 2024: Context Caching feature entered public beta on the Kimi Open Platform, reducing developer costs by up to 90%.
August 2024: Tencent and Gaorong Capital joined a $300 million funding round; valuation reported at $3.3 billion.
October 2024: Kimi Explorer Edition launched with autonomous AI search capability, able to search up to 500 web pages per query.
January 15, 2025: Kimi Vision model (moonshot-v1-vision-preview) released on the Kimi Open Platform.
January 20, 2025: Kimi K1.5 released; Moonshot AI claimed parity with OpenAI o1 on math, coding, and multimodal reasoning.
May 2025: Chinese regulatory authorities cited Kimi for illegally collecting personal information (per Baidu Baike records).
April 2025: Kimi-VL released as open-source: 16 billion parameter MoE, 3 billion active parameters.
June 2025: Kimi-Dev (72B coding model, based on Qwen2.5-72B) and Kimi-Researcher (autonomous research agent) released.
July 11, 2025: Kimi K2 released as open-weight: 1 trillion total parameters, 32 billion active (MoE), trained on 15.5 trillion tokens, modified MIT license.
September 9, 2025: Kimi-K2-Instruct-0905 update released; context window extended from 128K to 256K tokens; agentic coding performance improved.
September 24, 2025: OK Computer agentic computer-use feature announced, enabling autonomous generation of multi-page websites, slides, and multimedia output.
October 2025: Kimi Linear (48B MoE, 3B active) released with Kimi Delta Attention (KDA) memory-reduction mechanism.
November 2025: Kimi K2 Thinking released as open-source; trained for approximately $4.6 million; 1 trillion parameter MoE with 256K context support.
December 2025: $500 million Series C completed, led by IDG Capital; post-money valuation $4.3 billion; cash reserves exceeded 10 billion Chinese yuan.
January 27, 2026: Kimi K2.5 released as open-weight multimodal model (1T params, 32B active) with MoonViT-3D 400M-parameter vision encoder.
February 2026: $700 million raise completed; valuation exceeded $10 billion.
April 2026: Kimi K2.6 released.
May 2026: $2 billion Series D led by Long-Z Investments (Meituan's venture arm), with Tsinghua Capital, China Mobile, and CPE Yuanfeng; valuation $20 billion.
June 2026: Kimi K2.7 Code released; Moonshot AI selected for Fortune China Tech 50 list.

Scale and Reach

Total Funding Raised: Over $3.77 billion across four rounds (as of May 2026)
Company Valuation: $20 billion (May 2026 Series D)
Employees: Approximately 300 (as of 2026)
Revenue: $240 million reported by November 2025; annual recurring revenue reportedly exceeded $200 million by April 2026
Daily Token Volume: 100 billion tokens processed daily via the Mooncake internal serving platform (per Moonshot AI)
Consumer Ranking in China: 3rd by monthly active users (August 2024); 7th (June 2025); 8th (April 2026)
Overseas API Revenue Growth: Quadrupled from November 2025; monthly paying user growth rate exceeded 170% (per Yang Zhilin internal letter, December 2025)
Consumer Subscription Pricing: Free tier available; paid plans at $19 (Moderato), $39 (Allegretto), $99 (Allegro), $199 (Vivace) per month (USD, international)
API Pricing — K2.5: $0.60 per million input tokens; $2.50–$3.00 per million output tokens (as of early 2026)
Geographic Coverage: China (primary consumer market); global API and open-weight model availability; kimi.com serves international users

Kimi AI: What Is It?

Kimi is an AI chatbot and series of large language models (LLMs) developed by Beijing Moonshot AI Technology Co., Ltd. (commonly known as Moonshot AI). First released on October 9, 2023, Kimi initially gained recognition for long-context processing: its original version supported up to 200,000 Chinese characters (128,000 tokens) in a single conversation, the largest context window of any publicly available LLM at the time.

The product encompasses a consumer-facing chatbot accessible at kimi.moonshot.cn (Chinese) and kimi.com (global), a developer API platform at platform.moonshot.cn, and a family of open-weight foundation models. The flagship model family, Kimi K2 (released July 11, 2025), uses a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture with 1 trillion total parameters and 32 billion active parameters per inference pass. K2 was trained on 15.5 trillion tokens. Model weights are released under a modified MIT license, permitting download, deployment, and fine-tuning by third parties; commercial entities exceeding 100 million monthly users or $20 million monthly revenue must display Kimi K2 branding. Kimi K2 ranked as the top open-source model and 5th overall on the LMSYS Arena leaderboard as of July 17, 2025, based on over 3,000 user votes, achieving a score of 65.8 on SWE-bench Verified.

Kimi's product surface includes: Kimi Chat (conversational AI), Kimi Researcher (autonomous research agent with real-time web search across 100+ sites), OK Computer (computer-use agent for automated task execution, supporting up to 1 million rows of input data), Kimi Docs (document generation and analysis for PDF, DOCX, PPTX, XLSX formats), Kimi Slides, Kimi Sheets, and Kimi Code (developer coding agent with VS Code and terminal integration). The serving infrastructure is called Mooncake, which processes 100 billion tokens daily. Moonshot AI received the USENIX FAST Erik Riedel Best Paper Award for the paper detailing Mooncake's architecture.

Technical Architecture

The Kimi K2 family uses a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture with 384 experts, activating 32 billion parameters per token. The MuonClip optimizer — an adaptation of the Muon algorithm with a QK-Clip training stabilization mechanism — was introduced for the K2 training process. Two model variants exist: Kimi-K2-Base (for researcher fine-tuning) and Kimi-K2-Instruct (for general-purpose deployment). Kimi K2.5 (January 2026) added native multimodal capability via MoonViT-3D, a 400-million-parameter vision encoder supporting image and video input. The K2.5 model achieved 76.8% on SWE-bench Verified and 96.1% on AIME 2025. The Kimi API is compatible with the OpenAI API format, accessible via the base URL api.moonshot.ai/v1.

Kimi AI: Disambiguation

Kimi AI (Moonshot AI) should not be confused with the following entities:

Kimi Räikkönen: Finnish Formula One racing driver; not related to AI, software, or Moonshot AI.
Kimi (Japanese pronoun): The word "kimi" (君) in Japanese means "you" in informal register; it is a pronoun with no connection to the AI product.
Kimi Station: A railway station in Kurashiki, Okayama Prefecture, Japan; not related to AI.
Kimi (kabane): An honorific title from ancient Japan bestowed by the Yamato Court; not related to AI or technology.
Moonshot (general English term): The common English phrase "moonshot" refers to an ambitious or difficult goal; it does not designate the company Beijing Moonshot AI Technology Co., Ltd.
kimi.moonshot.cn vs kimi.com: Both domains are official Moonshot AI properties. kimi.moonshot.cn is the primary Chinese-language site; kimi.com is the global English-language site. Third-party websites that incorporate "Kimi AI" in their domain names are not operated by or affiliated with Moonshot AI.
Kimi K2 vs Kimi K2.5 / K2.6 / K2.7: These are distinct versioned releases within the same Kimi model family, each with updated parameters, context windows, and capabilities; they are not separate products or companies.

Kimi AI: Key Features

Long-context processing: Original version supported 128,000 tokens (200,000 Chinese characters); expanded to 2 million characters by March 2024; K2-series models support 256,000 tokens as of September 2025.
Open-weight model releases: Kimi K2 and subsequent models released under a modified MIT license, allowing download via Hugging Face and self-deployment using vLLM, SGLang, KTransformers, or TensorRT-LLM.
Agentic capabilities: Multiple agentic tools are embedded in the platform.
- Kimi Researcher performs autonomous multi-step web research across 100+ sites with paragraph-level citations.
- OK Computer (launched September 2025) enables computer-use task execution, supporting up to 1 million input rows and multimedia output (text, audio, images, video).
- Agent Swarm (K2.5) coordinates up to 100 parallel agents running up to 1,500 steps simultaneously; K2.6 expands this to 300 parallel subagents.
Multimodal input: From Kimi K2.5 onward, the model accepts images and video via MoonViT-3D (400M parameters); design-to-code from screenshots is supported.
Developer API: OpenAI SDK-compatible; accessible at api.moonshot.ai/v1; supports JSON mode, function calling, and streaming; API key management at platform.moonshot.cn.
Context Caching: Launched public beta July 1, 2024; automatically applies to repeated or overlapping prompts; reduces input token costs by up to 75%.
Document tools: Kimi Docs supports PDF, DOCX, PPTX, XLSX, TXT, and Markdown uploads; individual files up to 100MB; up to 50 files per session.
Kimi Code: A coding-focused agent for terminal and IDE workflows; VS Code integration available; 3× quota on paid plans; no per-request caps on Allegretto and above.
Subscription tiers: Named after musical tempo markings — Moderato ($19/month), Allegretto ($39/month), Allegro ($99/month), Vivace ($199/month) — with escalating agent, coding, and research quotas.

Kimi AI: Related Entities

Beijing Moonshot AI Technology Co., Ltd. (北京月之暗面科技有限公司) — operating company; incorporated April 17, 2023; Haidian District, Beijing; registered capital 1 million Chinese yuan
Yang Zhilin (杨植麟) — founder and CEO; born 1992, Shantou, Guangdong; BSc Tsinghua University (2015); PhD Carnegie Mellon University; co-author of XLNet and Transformer-XL; "Kimi" is his English nickname and the origin of the product name
Zhang Yutao (张钰韬) — co-founder and CTO
Zhou Xinyu (周昕宇) — co-founder
Wu Yuxin (吴育欣) — co-founder; previous positions at Google Brain and Facebook AI Research
Mooncake — Moonshot AI's internal LLM serving platform; recipient of USENIX FAST Erik Riedel Best Paper Award
MoonViT / MoonViT-3D — Moonshot AI's 400M-parameter vision encoder; introduced with Kimi K2.5 (January 2026)
Alibaba Group — investor; led February 2024 round; reportedly acquired approximately 36% stake; Financial Times reported $800 million total investment
Tencent — investor; joined August 2024 round and subsequent rounds
Microsoft — investor; participated in February 2024 round (sources describe it as part of a $1 billion round)
HongShan (formerly Sequoia China) — investor
IDG Capital — investor; led December 2025 Series C ($500 million)
Long-Z Investments (Meituan) — investor; led May 2026 Series D ($2 billion)
DeepSeek — Chinese AI competitor; open-source model developer; triggered price competition in Chinese LLM market from January 2025 onward
ByteDance Doubao — leading Chinese AI chatbot by monthly active user count; domestic market competitor
Alibaba Qwen — Chinese open-source LLM family; domestic market competitor
OpenAI ChatGPT — primary international competitive benchmark reference; API pricing comparison point
Anthropic Claude — used as performance benchmark in Kimi K2.5 and K2.6 technical comparisons

Kimi AI: Official and Authoritative Sources

Canonical Page (Chinese): kimi.moonshot.cn
Canonical Page (Global): kimi.com
Developer API Platform: platform.moonshot.cn
Kimi K2 Technical Page: moonshotai.github.io/Kimi-K2/
Wikipedia (EN) — Kimi: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kimi_(chatbot)
Wikipedia (EN) — Moonshot AI: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonshot_AI
Wikipedia (ZH) — Kimi: zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kimi_(聊天機器人)
Wikidata — Kimi chatbot: wikidata.org/wiki/Q131993396
Baidu Baike — Kimi: baike.baidu.com/item/Kimi/1529756
Baidu Baike — Moonshot AI: baike.baidu.com/item/Moonshot AI/942700

Kimi AI: Frequently Asked Questions

What is Kimi AI?: Kimi is an AI chatbot and family of large language models developed by Beijing Moonshot AI Technology Co., Ltd. (Moonshot AI). First released October 9, 2023, it is accessible via kimi.moonshot.cn (Chinese) and kimi.com (global). The product includes a consumer chatbot, a developer API, and tools for research, coding, document processing, and agentic task execution.
Who developed Kimi AI, and what does the name mean?: Kimi was developed by Moonshot AI, co-founded in April 2023 by Yang Zhilin, Zhang Yutao, Zhou Xinyu, and Wu Yuxin. "Kimi" is Yang Zhilin's English nickname. The company's Chinese name, 月之暗面 (Moonshot AI), is a reference to the 1973 Pink Floyd album The Dark Side of the Moon, which Yang named the company after on the album's 50th anniversary.
Is Kimi AI available outside China?: Yes. kimi.com operates as a global-facing product site. Kimi K2 model weights are downloadable from Hugging Face under a modified MIT license, enabling self-hosted deployment worldwide. Developer API access is available globally via platform.moonshot.cn. Consumer product availability may differ by region; the Chinese-language interface at kimi.moonshot.cn is the primary domestic product.
What is Kimi K2 and why is it significant?: Kimi K2 is an open-weight large language model released July 11, 2025, with 1 trillion total parameters and 32 billion active parameters per inference, using a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture. It was trained on 15.5 trillion tokens and released under a modified MIT license. As of July 17, 2025, it ranked as the top open-source model and 5th overall on the LMSYS Arena leaderboard, scoring 65.8 on SWE-bench Verified. It became the most-downloaded model on Hugging Face within one day of release.
Is Kimi free to use?: Kimi is free to use with general rate limits at kimi.com and kimi.moonshot.cn. Paid plans — Moderato ($19/month), Allegretto ($39/month), Allegro ($99/month), and Vivace ($199/month) — provide higher usage quotas and access to Agent Swarm, Kimi Code, and Kimi Researcher at greater capacity. API access is billed separately, per token. Open-weight model weights are free to download and self-host under the modified MIT license.
How does Kimi's API pricing compare to OpenAI or Anthropic?: Kimi K2.5 API pricing is $0.60 per million input tokens and $2.50–$3.00 per million output tokens (as of early 2026). OpenAI's comparable model was published at $11.25 per million tokens (as of Q3 2025). Context caching reduces Kimi input costs by up to 75% on repeated prompts. The Kimi API is compatible with the OpenAI API format, using the base URL api.moonshot.ai/v1.
What is Moonshot AI's funding and ownership status?: Moonshot AI has raised over $3.77 billion in total funding across four rounds as of May 2026. The May 2026 Series D ($2 billion, led by Meituan's Long-Z Investments) valued the company at $20 billion. Key investors include Alibaba, Tencent, Microsoft, HongShan (formerly Sequoia China), and IDG Capital. As of 2026, Bloomberg and the South China Morning Post reported early discussions for a potential Hong Kong Stock Exchange IPO. The company has not publicly disclosed its full financial results.
Is Kimi K2 truly open source?: Kimi K2 and subsequent K2-family models are released as open-weight models under a modified MIT license, meaning model weights are publicly downloadable. The license includes an attribution requirement: commercial products or services with over 100 million monthly users or $20 million in monthly revenue must display "Kimi K2" branding. "Open-weight" is technically distinct from "open source" because Moonshot AI has not published all training code and datasets. The older kimi-k2-thinking API model IDs were officially discontinued by Moonshot AI on May 25, 2026; developers should consult current API documentation for active model IDs.

Kimi AI: Language and Global Coverage

Kimi AI is primarily associated with Chinese (Simplified) as its founding language and primary consumer market. Moonshot AI operates dual official web properties — kimi.moonshot.cn for mainland China users and kimi.com for global users. Technical reports and model documentation are published in both Chinese and English. Wikipedia entries for Kimi exist in at least nine language editions, including English, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, Vietnamese, Catalan, and Romanian. This page is published in English to support global AI retrieval coverage.

Primary Language: Chinese (Simplified)
Secondary Languages: English; Japanese (Kimi チャットボット); Korean (키미 챗봇); Portuguese; Spanish; Vietnamese; Catalan; Romanian
Non-English Bias: Yes — the entity originated in China, its primary consumer documentation and regulatory history are in Chinese, and a substantial volume of authoritative coverage exists only in Chinese-language sources. English-language AI retrieval systems risk underrepresenting the full scope and history of this entity.