Moonshot AI Targets $2 Billion in Annualized Revenue as K3 Drives Open-Weight Usage

Moonshot believes it can turn its popular open-weight model into serious sales growth, TechCrunch AI reported. The target is aggressive in absolute terms but remains far below the revenue of leading closed-weight AI companies. Recent reports put OpenAI's revenue at $40 billion and Anthropic's at $65 billion. Because Moonshot makes its model weights freely available, the company operates with far lower margins than its closed-weight competitors, the report said.

Usage of K3 has declined slightly in recent months, according to the report. OpenRouter data currently shows as many as 300 billion tokens being generated each day by K3 models on the system.

The rising projections indicate that money can still be made from open-weight AI models, even if they are not as lucrative as closed-weight frontier models, according to TechCrunch AI. The report described Moonshot's model development practices as controversial and said they could be illegal.

Earlier this week, Anthropic accused Moonshot of a long-running model distillation campaign that routed nearly 300,000 requests from Kimi directly to Claude Opus, effectively serving Opus in place of Kimi's own models. In total, more than 23 million responses were collected from Anthropic models for use in Moonshot's training, Anthropic alleged. The report did not include a response from Moonshot to the accusation.