Chinese AI startup Moonshot AI temporarily paused new subscriptions to its Kimi K3 large language model after overwhelming demand pushed its compute capacity to near limits in late July 2026. The company said, "Over the past 48 hours, demand has pushed close to the limits of our current capacity. Our GPUs are feeling it. We’re adding capacity as fast as we can and will reopen new subscription spots in batches" [1]. Moonshot released the Kimi K3 model, featuring 2.8 trillion parameters and native vision abilities, on July 17, 2026. The model excels in coding, knowledge work, and reasoning while operating at lower cost than most U.S. competitors except Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 and OpenAI's GPT-5.6 [2, 3, 4].
Founded in 2023 by Carnegie Mellon alumnus and former Tsinghua professor Yang Zhilin, Moonshot AI has raised more than $5.5 billion to date, including over $2 billion raised in May 2026 alone. The startup is now seeking up to $2 billion in additional funding as it prepares for an initial public offering in Hong Kong, potentially within the next six months [5, 6, 7]. Moonshot plans to split Kimi subscriptions into two tiers: "Kimi Membership" for general web and work uses, and "Kimi Code Membership" targeting coding workflows [1].
OpenAI President Greg Brockman described Kimi K3 as "a pretty good model" but said it was too soon to determine if Moonshot AI relied on distillation of OpenAI's models to enhance its own. A White House official has accused Moonshot AI of improperly using U.S. AI models in its development process, allegations the company has yet to respond to [8].
Moonshot intends to release the full weights of the Kimi K3 model publicly by July 27, 2026, which will make it the largest open-weight AI model available to the public [2, 4]. The company is continuing to scale its computational infrastructure and aims to reopen new subscription spots in batches once capacity allows [1].
