Chinese AI startup Moonshot is preparing to launch Kimi K3, an open-weight model expected to rival Anthropic’s flagship systems while costing a fraction as much to run, according to a Financial Times report cited by PYMNTS. The model, expected to have between 2 trillion and 3 trillion parameters, would be China’s largest AI model to date, compared to Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.8, estimated at between 1.5 trillion and 2 trillion parameters. Kimi K3 is expected to outperform Claude Opus 4.8 on mainstream benchmarks but still trail Claude Fable 5, Anthropic’s most powerful model. The launch underscores how quickly Chinese AI developers are narrowing the technology gap, challenging the assumption that Chinese frontier models lag by eight to 12 months. Anthropic plans to raise prices for Claude Opus 4.8 in September to $3 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens, while Moonshot’s current K2.6 model costs roughly one-third as much. Anthropic earlier this year accused Chinese AI companies of conducting “industrial-scale distillation attacks.” OpenAI is weighing delaying its IPO until 2027, while Moonshot seeks a valuation of about $31.5 billion and rival DeepSeek pursues roughly $71 billion.