In San Francisco, Mozilla CTO Raffi Krikorian told Associated Press that he had shifted many of his daily tasks to Kimi K3 just days after the model's API launch. He didn't say he had abandoned Claude entirely: K3 felt more responsive for routine work, after he had already used another Chinese model, GLM-5.2.
AP picks up additional signals across the United States: some professionals are trying Chinese models for work, and Coinbase, again according to the agency, has introduced several of them into parts of its own infrastructure. Among the reasons for the interest, AP points to cost-effectiveness, performance considered competitive for certain tasks, response speed, and in some cases the possibility of greater control over the models.
The figures AP cites aren't enough to call it a broad shift. On OpenRouter alone, in the one-month window the agency observed, the five most-used models were Chinese. According to Sensor Tower estimates reported by AP, the Kimi app exceeded 930,000 global downloads in the week following the K3 launch, roughly 86,000 of them in the United States, with increases of 200 and 387 percent respectively compared to the previous week. A few days earlier, Moonshot had temporarily suspended new subscriptions, stating it had come close to capacity limits.
There is no representative data to say that American developers are switching to Chinese models en masse. As of July 26, moreover, the public release of Kimi K3's official weights — announced for the 27th — had not yet been verified.
