Moonshot AI Chases $18 Billion Valuation Weeks After Anthropic Accused It of Stealing Claude's Capabilities

Moonshot AI Eyes Eighteen Billion Dollar Valuation

Moonshot AI, the Chinese startup behind the popular Kimi chatbot, is in discussions to raise as much as one billion dollars in a new funding round that would value the company at approximately eighteen billion dollars. If completed, the deal would represent a staggering quadrupling of Moonshot's valuation in just three months, following a five hundred million dollar raise at four point three billion dollars late last year and a seven hundred million dollar round at ten billion dollars in February.

The company's backers include tech giants Alibaba and Tencent, along with venture firm 5Y Capital. Moonshot was founded by Yang Zhilin, a former Tsinghua University professor who previously worked on AI projects at Meta and Google.

The Distillation Controversy

The fundraising push comes amid significant controversy. On February twenty-third, Anthropic publicly accused Moonshot, along with fellow Chinese AI labs DeepSeek and MiniMax, of conducting industrial-scale distillation attacks on its Claude model. According to Anthropic, the three companies created more than twenty-four thousand fraudulent accounts and generated over sixteen million exchanges with Claude to extract its capabilities.

Moonshot was specifically accused of conducting three point four million exchanges targeting agentic reasoning, tool use, coding, and computer vision capabilities. MiniMax allegedly ran the largest operation with over thirteen million exchanges, while DeepSeek focused on foundational logic and politically sensitive queries.

Hypocrisy Debate and Market Impact

Critics were quick to note the irony of AI companies objecting to distillation while themselves training on vast amounts of copyrighted internet data. Ethics experts have argued that the core issue is not the technique itself, which is common in the industry, but the alleged fraudulent access and breach of contractual terms.

Despite the accusations, Moonshot's business appears to be thriving. Following the launch of Kimi Claw, powered by its latest Kimi K2.5 model with one trillion parameters, the company's monthly sales reportedly exceeded its total revenue for the entire previous year.