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OpenAI and Anthropic have led AI model development since AI applications first took off in 2022 and 2023. From the second half of 2023, however, Alibaba and DeepSeek began catching up with open-source models, and DeepSeek R1 sent shockwaves through the market when it launched in January 2025. Then, following the release of Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 in July 2026, the gap between leading Chinese and US models has narrowed significantly, prompting market discussion of a “second DeepSeek moment” and of the broader US-China AI contest.
This article goes beyond Kimi K3 itself. It compares China’s mainstream open-source models on both market and technical dimensions, and assesses the competitive position of Chinese models against their US counterparts.
Kimi K3: The Largest Open-Source Model to Date
On July 16, 2026, Moonshot AI, the Chinese AI startup backed by Alibaba and Tencent, opened the API access for its flagship model Kimi K3, and formally released the full weights on July 27.
Kimi K3 is a 2.8T-parameter MoE model, and activates about 104.2B parameters per token. It contains 896 experts, with 16 activated per token for a sparsity of roughly 56, alongside 2 shared experts. This makes Kimi K3 the largest open-source model in the world at present.
DeepSeek followed on July 31 with the official launch of DeepSeek V4 Flash, an extremely lightweight model at just 284B total parameters and only 13B active MoE parameters. The higher-tier DeepSeek V4 Pro, at 1.6T total parameters, released on August 13.
Alibaba Cloud released the weights for its flagship model Qwen 3.8 Max on August 14. It carries 2.4T total parameters with 95B active MoE parameters, making it the world’s second largest open-source model behind Kimi K3.
We will then compare Kimi K3, Qwen 3.8 Max, and DeepSeek V4 Flash on specifications, performance (based on the benchmarks from Artificial Analysis), and API pricing, and analyze the market positioning of each.
Related report: Kimi K3 Dominates Global Open-Source Models: Core Technologies and the New US-China AI Race