Silicon Valley has spent much of the past week on red alert, digesting the arrival of Moonshot AI's Kimi K3, a Chinese AI model that can allegedly beat some of the best systems built by US companies at a fraction of the cost.
Its performance alone would have been enough to intensify the rivalry between the US and China. But Moonshot's plan to release the model's weights for free - and its clear targeting of US users - has fueled deeper unease about whether closed American models can continue to dominate as increasingly capable open alternatives enter the market.
Open-weight models give developers far greater control than proprietary syst …
