Moonshot's new Kimi K3 model is priced at roughly half the cost of Anthropic's Opus 4.8 while offering slightly better overall performance, charging ~$3 per million input tokens and ~$15 per million output tokens. This pricing strategy, similar to Anthropic's mid-tier Sonnet, contrasts with DeepSeek's earlier deflationary approach, as Moonshot likely needs revenue to secure compute and meet demand. The release caused SoftBank's stock price to fall 9%, reflecting concerns about the monetization gap for labs like OpenAI and Anthropic.
The competitive pricing of Moonshot's Kimi K3 model compresses the defensible ground for Western frontier labs, shifting their revenue assumptions from pricing power to distribution and enterprise trust.