Moonshot: Why President Xi Calls for Global AI Governance

Chinese artificial-intelligence startup, Moonshot has released Kimi K3 – a 2.8tn parameter model with native vision capabilities and a 1-million-token context window.

The release comes as Chinese President Xi Jinping outlined his position on global AI governance at a conference in Shanghai.

The model still performs slightly below the peaks of the most advanced US frontier models – including Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 and OpenAI's GPT 5.6 Sol – according to information released by Moonshot.

Although, the company states its model demonstrates frontier level performance in long-horizon coding, knowledge work and reasoning tasks.

How good is Kimi K3?

Moonshot claims that for nine of the past twelve months, Kimi models have set the upper bound of open-model sizes.

The Kimi K3 deployment marks the first open model to reach 2.8 trillion parameters, according to the Chinese company.

Industry experts cited by the Financial Times speculate that Anthropic's flagship Claude Opus 4.8 has 1.5 trillion to two trillion parameters.

Information released by Moonshot notes that Kimi K3 is outperforming OpenAI's GPT 5.5 and Anthropic's Opus 4.8 across most benchmarks including coding, general agent and visual agent tasks.

The company claims that as an early proof of concept, the model designed, optimised and verified a chip to serve a nano model built on its own architecture, in a 48-hour autonomous run.

Anthropic alleges systematic extraction attacks

In February 2026, Anthropic accused Chinese artificial-intelligence labs DeepSeek, Moonshot and MiniMax of "industrial-scale campaigns" to "illicitly extract Claude's capabilities to improve their own models".

The US AI giant said the attacks were growing in intensity and sophistication and stressed it required rapid, coordinated action among industry players.

The allegations highlight the threat landscape around large language model intellectual property theft. 

Chinese models are generally believed to be slightly behind the most advanced US models, but Chinese firms are advancing in technology and they are doing so rapidly.

The Boston Consulting Group has argued that while the US is maintaining its lead on frontier artificial-intelligence models, talent and capital deployment, China is pushing ahead on cost-optimised models and accelerating adoption across its economy.

Back in January 2025, DeepSeek had made global headlines when it released DeepSeek R1 – which cost far less than key US models to create.

The model was widely considered a serious rival to OpenAI's ChatGPT, with US President Donald Trump describing it as a "wake up call" stressing its industries needed to be "laser-focussed".

Xi calls for coordinated governance framework

As Moonshot released its latest model which rivals US offerings, President Xi was laying out his vision for artificial intelligence at a conference in Shanghai, stressing that it should not be a performance by a single country.

Comments released by the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, that have been translated from Chinese, show President Xi saying that "global AI technology innovation is entering an unprecedented period of activity".

"We must attach great importance to the various inherent and derivative risks arising from AI," he said, arguing for the construction of a legal and regulatory, technical monitoring, risk warning and emergency response system. 

"We must advocate for concerted efforts and improve global governance.

"AI is a shared intellectual achievement and a valuable asset of all humankind," he added, stressing countries should "establish a broadly consensus-based global governance framework as soon as possible."

His comments come shortly after the CEO of Google DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, warned of the risks posed by artificial general intelligence while calling for a US-led governance framework.