New China AI Halts Subscriptions       07/20 06:27

   

   HONG KONG (AP) -- The new, powerful Chinese artificial intelligence model 
Kimi K3, which has caused a stir in the U.S. tech industry, has suspended new 
subscriptions after a flood in demand overwhelmed capacity within days of the 
launch.

   The development highlighted challenges faced by Chinese AI models in serving 
a growing user base at home and abroad at a time the U.S.-China tech race is 
heating up.

   Chinese open-source, lower-cost advanced AI models, including DeepSeek's 
latest V4, have been moving fast in gaining global attention. In early 2025, 
DeepSeek shook world markets and helped China to be recognized as a serious 
competitor to the U.S., where Chinese frontier AI models are largely open 
source, meaning they are made accessible for people to examine and build upon.

   "Kimi K3 has received far more love than we expected," Moonshot AI, which is 
Beijing-based, wrote in a X post late on Sunday. "Over the past 48 hours, 
demand has pushed close to the limits of our current capacity."

   Moonshot said that it's prioritizing existing subscribers and would be 
temporarily pausing new ones. "We're adding capacity as fast as we can and will 
reopen new subscription spots in batches," it added. The AI startup also posted 
a similar message on Chinese social media.

   K3's public rollout late last week, aiming at challenging more advanced AI 
models by Anthropic,OpenAI and others, has rattled U.S. rivals. At 2.8 trillion 
parameters, a measurement of an AI model's capabilities, it's deemed as the 
world's largest open-source AI model.

   "New model releases generally trigger massive interest, which can strain 
existing compute infrastructure," said Lian Jye Su, a chief analyst at the 
technology research and advisory group Omdia. "This does show Moonshot AI does 
not have sufficient compute chips to serve the current surge in demand."

   Su said that the key reason was more likely due to Moonshot not fully 
anticipating the surge in K3's popularity. K3 is "very demanding" in terms of 
compute requirements, he said, making compute allocation challenging and 
expensive.

   By measure of front-end coding capability, a metric for AI models' 
performances, Kimi K3 topped the chart of the major advanced AI models in 
rankings on Arena -- an AI model evaluation platform -- after its public 
release.

   K3's release has also put pressure on stocks of American technology titans 
on worries that more affordable Chinese AI models may undercut the pricing 
power and demand at the U.S. AI companies, even as U.S.-led restrictions have 
already barred China from accessing some of the world's advanced technologies, 
including the most cutting-edge chips.

   K3 is one of the latest new Chinese AI models coming out that have drawn 
strong global reactions.

   Over the weekend, China's Alibaba also previewed its latest Qwen3.8 Max AI 
model, which the tech giant said had 2.4 trillion parameters as one of the 
world's most powerful models and was second only to Anthropic's Fable 5. Last 
month, Chinese startup Zhipu, or Z.ai, also rolled out its GLM-5.2 model, which 
saw rapid adoption across the world.