New Delhi, July 22 -- Spare a thought for America's leading developers of artificial intelligence. They pour blood, sweat and gazillions of dollars into each new release of a frontier model. Yet before they have time to catch their breath, their competitors have already caught up. It would be bad enough if rivals that charge for their technology were the only ones nipping at their heels. But the likes of Anthropic and OpenAI must also sprint to stay just a few steps ahead of labs that give their models away for free.

On July 16th Moonshot AI, a Chinese startup, released Kimi K3-a model that is only slightly less capable than Fable or Sol, the latest offerings from Anthropic and OpenAI, respectively. Its parameters (or "weights") will be ...