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A new Chinese AI model claims to outperform GPT-5 and Sonnet 4.5 - and it's free

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ZDNET's key takeaways

Moonshot released its new Kimi K2 Thinking model on Thursday.

It claims to outperform GPT-5 and Sonnet 4.5 on some benchmarks.

Open-source AI poses a challenge to proprietary US models.

The global AI arms race stays in constant flux, this time thanks to the arrival of a new model from the up-and-coming Chinese AI lab Moonshot.

Also: Why open source may not survive the rise of generative AI

On Thursday, the Beijing-based company released Kimi K2 Thinking, a reasoning model that it says outperforms OpenAI's GPT-5 and Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 4.5 on key benchmarks, including Humanity's Last Exam, BrowseComp (which tests AI agents' ability to extract hard-to-find online information via web browsers), and Seal-0 (which assesses reasoning capabilities). Kimi K2 Thinking also showed coding abilities that were comparable to GPT-5 and Sonnet 4.5, but not notably more impressive.

Credit: Moonshot

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