Moonshot AI is the Beijing lab behind Kimi, one of the clearest signals that frontier-class intelligence no longer requires frontier pricing. Founded in 2023 and led by Yang Zhilin, it paired a fast-rising model line with a popular consumer assistant and climbed the global intelligence charts release over release.
Kimi’s appeal is efficiency. It posts near-frontier intelligence and coding scores while pricing well below the US labs, and it holds long context well. For cost-sensitive, high-volume work, that intelligence-per-dollar is hard to argue with. The main consideration is sovereignty: Moonshot is China-based, which shapes data-residency and procurement decisions for regulated buyers.
The catalogue below is every Kimi model we track, joined live to pricing, context, and benchmark scores.