Even as concern and skepticism grows over U.S. AI startup OpenAI’s buildout strategy and high spending commitments, Chinese open source AI providers are escalating their competition and one has even caught up to OpenAI’s flagship, paid proprietary model GPT-5 in key third-party performance benchmarks with a new, free model. The Chinese AI startup Moonshot AI’s new Kimi K2 Thinking model, released today, has vaulted past both proprietary and open-weight competitors to claim the top position in reasoning, coding, and agentic-tool benchmarks. Despite being fully open-source, the model now outperforms OpenAI’s GPT-5, Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4.5 (Thinking mode), and xAI’s Grok-4 on several standard evaluations — an inflection point for the competitiveness of open AI systems.Developers can access the model via platform.moonshot.ai and kimi.com; weights and code are hosted on Hugging Face. The open release includes APIs for chat, reasoning, and multi-tool workflows.Users can try out Kimi K2 Thinking directly through its own ChatGPT-like website competitor and on a Hugging Face space as well. Modified Standard Open Source LicenseMoonshot AI has formally released Kimi K2 Thinking under a Modified MIT License on Hugging Face.The license grants full commercial and derivative rights — meaning individual researchers and developers working on behalf of enterprise clients can access it freely and use it in commercial applications — but adds one restriction:”If the software or any derivative product serves over 100 million monthly active users or generates over $20 million USD per month in revenue, the deployer must prominently display ‘Kimi K2’ on the product’s user interface.”For most research and enterprise applications, this clause functions as a light-touch attribution requirement while preserving the freedoms of standard MIT licensing. It makes K2 Thinking one of the most permissively licensed frontier-class models currently available.A New Benchmark LeaderKimi K2 Thinking is a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model built around one trillion parameters, of which 32 billion activate per inference. It combines long-horizon reasoning with structured tool use, executing up to 200–300 sequential tool calls without human intervention.According to Moonshot’s published test results, K2 Thinking achieved:44.9 % on Humanity’s Last Ex …
