Kimi, the AI system that caused panic across the tech industry, says that it is proving so popular it must partially shut down.
The new system, made by Chinese company Moonshot AI, was revealed last week and sparked worries that the US’s control over artificial intelligence could be threatened and that the multi-billion dollar companies that currently reign over the tech industry could fall behind. That worry was part of the reason that US tech stocks dramatically fell in recent days.
Now Moonshot has said that the system has proven so popular that it is unable to reliably stay online – and that it has been forced to take a number of steps to limit the number of people using it.
“Kimi K3 has received far more love than we expected, and our GPUs are feeling it,” Moonshot said, referring to the computer systems that are required to run such large language models. The interest meant that “demand has pushed close to the limits of our current capacity”, it said.
As such, it said that it had been forced to pause new subscriptions so that it could prioritise access for existing subscribers. “We're adding capacity as fast as we can and will reopen new subscription spots in batches,” it said.
It also said that it would be splitting its premium memberships into two different versions, focused on those who use it for coding and those who use it for other work. “Thank you for your patience and understanding!” the company wrote in a tweet.
The capacity crunch follows a strong reception for Kimi K3, which Moonshot unveiled on Friday as a 2.8 trillion-parameter model, making it the world's largest open-weight AI system, according to the company.
Kimi K3's size and focus on coding and agent-style tasks make it more expensive to serve at scale, as such workflows typically require repeated model calls and heavy inference capacity.
While open-weight models allow users to download and customise the underlying system, analysts say few users are likely to host a model of KimiK3's scale themselves because of the hardware costs involved.
Moonshot said Kimi K3 performed competitively with leading U.S. models in some technical tasks while independent evaluations have also pointed to strong performance.
The launch comes as other Chinese AI firms such as Z.ai and MiniMax release more capable models at lower cost, challenging assumptions that China's model developers lag US peers by months.
Alibaba, an investor in Moonshot, said on Sunday Qwen3.8-Max-Preview, its 2.4-trillion-parameter model, had debuted on its AI platforms ahead of a planned open-weight release.
US export controls on advanced Nvidia chips, however, have made access to computing power a key constraint for these ambitious companies.
Additional reporting by agencies
