On 16 July 2026, Beijing-based Moonshot AI released Kimi K3, a model containing 2.8 trillion parameters and a context window of one million tokens. Its weights have since been published on Hugging Face under a modified MIT licence, making K3 the largest openly available large language model in history. On independent benchmarks from Vals AI it ranks second overall, behind only Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5 and ahead of OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol. On the Arena Frontend Code leaderboard it placed first.

Several headlines have framed this as China closing the AI gap through sheer force of innovation. The reality is more interesting, and considerably less comfortable for everyone involved. In the language of the AI industry, the technique that allegedly accelerated K3’s development is called distillation. In plainer English, there is an older word for an unlicensed spirit produced from someone else’s recipe. The word is moonshine.

In February 2026, Anthropic publicly accused Moonshot AI, DeepSeek and MiniMax of running coordinated distillation campaigns against its Claude model. According to Anthropic, the three labs collectively created approximately 24,000 fraudulent accounts and generated more than 16 million exchanges with Claude, using carefully crafted prompts to extract its most advanced........

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