The Chinese AI model stopped accepting new registrations due to overload

“The Kimi K3 received popularity beyond expectations, nearly reaching the limit of our current capacity,” Moonshot AI announced on X earlier this week. The startup announced Kimi K3 on July 17, calling it the world’s largest open weight model (publicizing the parameters used in the training process, allowing others to download and modify) with 2.8 trillion parameters, and is expected to be fully released on July 27.

Moonshot AI said that the company is prioritizing serving existing accounts and temporarily stopping accepting new registrations. “We are expanding capacity as quickly as possible and will reopen in waves,” the company added.

“The launch of new models often attracts great interest, putting pressure on existing computing infrastructure. This shows that Moonshot AI does not have enough computing chips to meet the sudden interest,” said Lian Jye Su, an analyst at technology research and consulting firm Omdia.

According to Su, Moonshot AI may not have anticipated the popularity of the Kimi K3, which is computationally demanding, making resource allocation difficult and expensive.

Theo Business Insider, Kimi K3 can process hundreds of pages of text with a single command line, suitable for the task of analyzing long documents and large code bases. Its programming capabilities and agents are competitive with leading models from US companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic, but at a much lower cost.

AP said that in terms of user interface programming ability – a measure of AI model performance, Kimi K3 rose to the top of the major advanced AI model rankings on the Arena platform. Box CEO Aaron Levie said that the release of Kimi K3 is a “big win” for companies building on AI platforms. He said he was “really surprised” when he saw the performance of the open model, because Kimi K3 was second only to Claude Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol in the intelligence index rankings of independent AI evaluation platform Artificial Analysis.

Moonshot AI was co-founded by Yang Zhilin, an AI researcher who studied for a doctorate at Carnegie Mellon University (USA), in 2023. According to Reutersthis startup raised more than 2 billion USD in May, bringing its total capital to more than 5.5 billion USD. The company is said to be raising another $2 billion and reaching a valuation of $30 billion.

The need for strong models is increasingly urging investors to pay attention to China’s leading AI startups, leading to the need for computing infrastructure, which is very expensive. Startups competing with Moonshot AI, including DeepSeek, have also recently sought outside capital to expand their computing capacity as Chinese AI companies race to close the gap with their American rivals.