Just days after launching what it describes as its most advanced artificial intelligence model yet, Chinese AI start-up Moonshot has temporarily stopped accepting new paid subscribers. The company said demand for its latest AI model, Kimi K3, has exceeded its available computing capacity.
In a post on X, Moonshot said, "Over the past 48 hours, demand has pushed close to the limits of our current capacity. To protect the experience of existing subscribers, we're temporarily pausing new subscriptions and prioritizing compute for current members. Existing subscribed users are not affected."
The company said current subscribers will continue to receive uninterrupted service, while new memberships will resume gradually as additional computing resources become available.
AI SUBSCRIPTION MODEL ALSO CHANGES
Alongside the temporary suspension of new subscriptions, Moonshot has announced changes to its membership structure.
"Going forward, we'll also split membership into two more focused plans: Kimi Membership for Kimi Web, App, and Work; and Kimi Code Membership for coding workflows. This will help us match compute more precisely and keep the experience stable," the company said.
KIMI K3
The subscription freeze comes only days after Moonshot introduced Kimi K3 at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai.
The company is positioning the new model as one of China's strongest competitors to leading AI systems developed by US companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic. Moonshot has also announced plans to release Kimi K3's open-source model weights on July 27, enabling developers to download, modify and run the model independently.
WHAT IS KIMI K3?
Moonshot describes Kimi K3 as its most powerful flagship AI model to date.
Built on a 2.8-trillion-parameter Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture, the model features a one-million-token context window, native multimodal capabilities that can process both text and images, and is designed to handle extended reasoning, coding and AI agent-based tasks.
Unlike conventional chatbots that primarily respond to user prompts, Kimi K3 is designed to complete longer and more complex workflows with minimal human intervention. According to Moonshot, the model can assist with software development, research analysis, financial data processing, image understanding, presentation creation and even video editing.
The company said the model is powered by two new technologies—Kimi Delta Attention and Attention Residuals—which allow it to process significantly larger amounts of information while using computing resources more efficiently.
COMPETITOR TO CLAUDE AND CHATGPT
Moonshot is positioning Kimi K3 as a direct competitor to AI models developed by OpenAI and Anthropic.
According to the company, Kimi K3 performs at or near the level of leading frontier AI models across several public benchmark tests. It also claimed that Kimi K3 Max outperformed Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.8 and OpenAI's GPT-5.5 in some of its internal evaluations involving online research, presentation generation and financial analysis.
However, these performance claims are based on Moonshot's own testing and have not yet been independently verified.
The launch comes amid intensifying competition between Chinese and American AI companies to develop increasingly capable foundation models. Unlike OpenAI and Anthropic, which keep their flagship models proprietary, Moonshot plans to make Kimi K3 open-source, allowing developers to download, customise and build applications using the model.
