This is one outlet's own report from Fortune — the article as it was filed.
AIPROPX ReportFortune · 4h ago
China’s Moonshot, Z.AI, and DeepSeek are challenging U.S. AI labs—and beating them on cost
It was, perhaps, the worst-kept secret in the AI community.
In mid-July, online sleuths who obsessively track the internet for signs of new AI models started to whisper about the latest offering from Moonshot AI, the Beijing-based artificial intelligence startup behind the Kimi large language model: Something big was coming .
Moonshot AI’s latest model didn’t just live up to the hype—it raised the stakes.
On July 16, Moonshot debuted Kimi K3, the largest open-source model ever released, and promised it could perform close to the level of Anthropic’s Fable 5—perhaps the most powerful publicly available model on the market today—at a fraction of the cost. Moonshot’s official benchmarks consistently rank K3 among the top three AI models; one independent benchmark from Arena.AI even pegged K3 as the best model currently available, ahead of Anthropic.
The launch was a triumph for the lab and its founder Yang Zhilin, a 34-year-old Tsinghua and Carnegie Mellon alumnus—and Pink Floyd fan—who based his startup’s Chinese name on his favorite album, The Dark Side of the Moon .
But the release also rattled investors because it challenged the idea that U.S. firms could maintain their sizable lead in the global AI race simply by outspending Chinese rivals on computing power.
Markets sold off in Asia. The chip-focused Philadelphia Semiconductor Index fell 1.6%. Nvidia lost almost $600 billion in value and briefly lost its spot as the world’s most valuable company to Apple .
Many observers, including Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, hadn’t expected a Chinese AI lab to release a model that could approach the U.S.’s best offerings for at least another six months. Tesla CEO Elon Musk suggested it might happen by the first quarter of next year. Kimi K3 blew up the timeline: Chinese AI is now cheap enough and good enough that even U.S. startups and Fortune 500 companies are quietly plugging the models into their operations to rein in spiraling AI budgets. It’s a remarkable closing of the gap that China achieved despite Washington imposing export controls to choke off China’s access to the world’s most advanced chips.
“The AI ecosystem in China is probably much better than people thought,” says Paul Triolo, a partner at DGA–Albright Stonebridge Group.
Chinese developers have been working from a severe disadvantage for years.
The U.S. began to cut China off from top-tier AI processors, like those made by Nvidia, in 2022. By limiting the sale of the advanced chips used to train and run AI models—and the tools that could be used to make them—Washington planned to kneecap China’s tech sector and preserve the U.S.’s AI lead.
DeepSeek, a Hangzhou-based lab attached to a Chinese hedge fund, punched a hole in that strategy in early 2025. It shocked the AI world by debuting its V3 and R1 models that matched the performance of its U.S. counterparts. DeepSeek claimed to have trained the models with a tiny budget by engineering efficiency with smart programming and math tricks. The models proved that Chinese AI developers could keep innovating, even with second-tier hardware.
DeepSeek was an early winner in China’s AI race, but rapid-fire model releases kept ushering in new favorites.
In June, AI startup Z.ai stole the spotlight when it released its GLM-5.2 model, which proved particularly strong at coding and creative design. Its newly listed stock had been on a tear, up over 1,100% through mid-July. At times, it broke 1 trillion Hong Kong dollars ($127.6 billion) in market capitalization, valuing the company—which had just $106 million in revenue last year—the same as BYD and Starbucks . But Moonshot’s Kimi K3 launch sent shares tumbling 40% in two days.
Even China’s consumer-internet giants are getting into the “frontier” race. Meituan’s LongCat-2.0 model encompassed as much data as DeepSeek’s V4 and performed at levels that matched OpenAI and Anthropic releases from February. More important, Meituan, best known as a food-delivery platform, claimed it trained the system entirely on Chinese-made processors rather than U.S. chips.
“The idea that Meituan could train a 1.6 trillion-parameter model on domestic hardware would have been inconceivable in October 2022,” says Triolo, referring to the month when the U.S. launched its AI export controls.
AI users globally are adapting to the new reality in which Chinese AI models are competitive with U.S. models on capability and far superior on price.
Chinese models now dominate much of the activity on OpenRouter, a popular marketplace where developers can access different models and providers through a single interface. At one point in mid-July, six of the top 10 models—and all of the top five—came from Chinese companies: Tencent , Xiaomi , DeepSeek, MiniMax, Moonshot, and Z.ai.
The rankings capture usage in developer circles, but adoption is showing up inside mainstream companies, too. Last year, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky said his company was using Alibaba’s Qwen for customer service. Cursor, the AI coding startup, has said that Moonshot AI’s Kimi provided the foundation for Composer 2, its coding model. In a June social media post, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong explained how the crypto platform had halved its AI spending by pushing more of its employees to use Kimi and Z.ai’s GLM models.
One million tokens of output—roughly 750,000 words—cost $50 when using Anthropic’s Fable model. The same million output tokens from DeepSeek-V4-Pro cost about $0.87, while Z.ai GLM-5.2 cost $4.40. Kimi K3 is relatively pricey by Chinese standards at $15.
DoorDash is pushing coding tasks to Chinese models, with chief technology officer Andy Fang saying the company delegates “lower-level work” to Kimi, leading to “better quality [at] cheaper cost.”
57%
Chinese AI models’ share of tokens used by U.S. firms on OpenRouter in one week in July.
$15
The cost of 1 million output tokens on Kimi K3, undercutting Fable’s $50 rate. Sources: Moonshot AI, OpenRouter
China’s MoonshotZ.AIDeepSeekU.SThe AIChinaMoonshot AIBeijingKimiSomethingMoonshot AI’sOn July
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