An open AI model from China has beaten proprietary models from the top US labs on Artificial Analysis’ model rankings.
Kimi K2 Thinking is placed ahead of the top models from Google, Anthropic and xAI on the Artificial Analysis overall rankings. Even more impressively, the model is open-weights, unlike the other models from these frontier labs. The Artificial Analysis scorecard measures model capability across a host of tasks such as coding and math.
Kimi K2 Thinking has made a massive jump from its predecessor Kimi K2. Kimi K2 had scored 48 in the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, while Kimi K2 Thinking clocks in at 67. The only models ahead of it are GPT-5 Codex (high) and GPT-5 (high), which have scored 68 each. Prominent flagship models such as Grok 4 (65), Claude 4.5 Sonnet (63) and Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro (60) lag it by a considerable margin.
The performance also made Kimi K2 Thinking the leading open-source model, allowing China to retake the crown from the US. Earlier, OpenAI’s gpt-oss had become the strongest open-weights model, but Kimi K2 Thinking has outperformed it by a wide margin.
Kimi K2 Thinking seems to particularly excel at agentic tasks. “Kimi K2 Thinking demonstrates particular strength in agentic contexts, as showcased by its #2 position in the Artificial Analysis Agentic Index – where it is second only to GPT-5. This is mostly driven by K2 Thinking achieving 93% in 𝜏²-Bench Telecom, an agentic tool use benchmark where the model acts as a customer service agent. This is the highest score we have independently measured,” Artificial Analysis said.
China’s Rising AI Influence
Kimi K2 Thinking’s performance underscores China’s growing prominence in the global AI landscape. Moonshot AI, the company behind the Kimi Series of models, was founded in March 2023. Moonshot AI is headquartered in Beijing, with a mission to develop Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) through advanced large language models. The company was co-founded by Yang Zhilin, a Tsinghua University and Carnegie Mellon University alumnus with experience at Google Brain and Meta AI.While American companies have dominated AI development headlines in recent years, Chinese firms and research institutions have made substantial investments in both foundational research and practical applications. Moonshot AI joins a cohort of Chinese AI companies, including DeepSeek, Alibaba, and Baidu, that have released increasingly competitive models, often matching or exceeding capabilities of Western counterparts.
The rise of Kimi and other Chinese models reflects several factors driving Chinese AI development. Significant government support through industrial policy and research funding has created an ecosystem conducive to rapid advancement. Chinese tech companies have also invested heavily in computational infrastructure, with access to substantial GPU clusters and training resources. Additionally, China’s large domestic market provides extensive opportunities for data collection and real-world testing of AI systems.
The release of K2 Thinking as an open model is particularly noteworthy in the context of ongoing technological competition between the United States and China. While U.S. export controls have restricted China’s access to cutting-edge AI chips, Chinese companies have demonstrated ability to achieve strong results despite hardware constraints, often through algorithmic innovation and efficient training techniques. The decision to release K2 Thinking as open source may also reflect a strategic calculation: by making the model widely available, Moonshot AI can accelerate adoption, build ecosystem support, and establish technical standards that could influence the broader direction of AI development.
There has been concern from the US over China’s rapid AI progress. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang had warned that China would win the AI race if the US didn’t redouble its AI efforts, and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and VC Marc Andreessen have said that the US winning the AI race is a geostrategic imperative for the country. Just two weeks ago, Chinese open-source models had gone past US open-source models in downloads. And with an open Chinese model now beating the best closed US models on several benchmarks, it does appear that China’s dominance in AI might come a lot sooner than most people expect.