This Chinese AI Model Claims to Beat GPT-5 — And It’s Completely Free

BEIJING: The global AI race has entered a new phase as Moonshot AI Lab, a Beijing-based research company, unveiled its latest large language model — Kimi K2 Thinking — which it claims can outperform OpenAI’s GPT-5 and Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4.5 on several reasoning and planning benchmarks.

What’s even more notable is that Kimi K2 Thinking is completely free and open-source, signaling a major shift in accessibility for high-performance AI systems traditionally locked behind paywalls.

A reasoning-focused Mixture-of-Experts model
According to Moonshot AI, Kimi K2 is designed around a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture — a structure that enables the model to dynamically select specialized “expert” sub-networks for different types of tasks. This design allows for more efficient reasoning and resource optimization without sacrificing output quality.

The company says K2 integrates advanced long-horizon planning, adaptive reasoning, and real-time web browsing capabilities, giving it the ability to handle multi-stage, high-context problems that require analytical depth and factual grounding.

In internal testing, Kimi K2 reportedly outperformed GPT-5 and Claude Sonnet 4.5 on several reasoning and planning benchmarks, including:

• Humanity’s Last Exam – a multi-disciplinary reasoning benchmark,
• BrowseComp – a test of web-enabled problem solving, and
• Seal-0 – a long-context comprehension and logic evaluation suite.

While its coding performance matched GPT-5 and Claude Sonnet 4.5, it did not significantly surpass them, suggesting that Moonshot’s focus remains firmly on reasoning over raw code generation.

Training, parameters, and accessibility
Kimi K2 was trained on approximately one trillion parameters, putting it on par with the largest publicly known models in the world. It also features an advanced retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) mechanism and multi-agent coordination layer — tools that enable better contextual memory and data synthesis across sessions.

Perhaps the most revolutionary aspect of the release is its accessibility. Moonshot AI has made Kimi K2 Thinking available for free on Hugging Face, the open-source model repository often dubbed the “GitHub for AI.” This move has already sparked significant interest within developer and academic communities eager to experiment with frontier-level AI without restrictive paywalls.

A growing challenge to Western AI dominance
Analysts view Kimi K2’s release as a bold statement of intent by China’s AI sector, which has accelerated research and open-source development amid increasing competition with Western firms.

If its benchmark results hold up under independent testing, Kimi K2 Thinking could mark one of the most significant open-source AI breakthroughs since Meta’s LLaMA 3, offering researchers and developers a new high-performance model that’s both transparent and free to use.