Moonshot AI, a Chinese startup backed by Alibaba, has announced the launch of its latest artificial intelligence model, Kimi K2 Thinking, on November 6. The new model has outperformed several prominent AI systems, including OpenAI’s GPT-5 and Claude Sonnet 4.5, across key reasoning and coding benchmarks.
According to Moonshot AI, Kimi K2 Thinking operates with 32 billion parameters activated per inference from a total of one trillion parameters. It also supports context windows of up to 2,56,000 tokens, offering enhanced performance for complex reasoning and long-form tasks.
The model can execute between 200 and 300 sequential tool calls without requiring human input, demonstrating strong automation capabilities. Benchmark tests revealed that Kimi K2 Thinking achieved scores of 44.9 per cent on the Humanity’s Last Exam benchmark with tools enabled, 60.2 per cent on the BrowseComp web-search reasoning benchmark, and 71.3 per cent on SWE-bench Verified, which assess reasoning and coding performance.
Moonshot AI stated that Kimi K2 Thinking has been specifically designed for explicit reasoning, with intermediate logical steps visible in its outputs to enhance transparency across multi-step processes. Despite its trillion-parameter scale, the company explained that the model maintains an efficient runtime cost.
Pricing is listed at 0.15 dollars per one million tokens for cache hits, 0.60 dollars for cache misses, and 2.50 dollars for output. These rates are highly competitive compared to MiniMax-M2’s 0.30 dollars for input and 1.20 dollars for output, and significantly lower than GPT-5’s 1.25 dollars for input and 10 dollars for output.
The open-source model is released under a Modified MIT Licence, which allows free commercial use with one attribution condition for large-scale deployments.
The launch of Kimi K2 Thinking marks an important milestone in China’s growing AI landscape, as open-source firms increasingly challenge leading proprietary systems from the United States. Moonshot AI sees this development as a major step towards making advanced AI capabilities more accessible globally.
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