China’s Moonshot AI has released a new open-source model named Kimi K2.5. The company, backed by Alibaba and HongShan, created a model that natively understands text, image, and video content.
This multimodality is due to training on 15 trillion mixed visual and text tokens. The model excels at coding tasks and handling agent swarms, where multiple AI agents work together in orchestration. In released benchmarks, Kimi K2.5 matches the performance of proprietary models and even surpasses them in certain areas.
For coding, the model outperforms Gemini 3 Pro on the SWE-Bench Verified benchmark. It also scores higher than GPT 5.2 and Gemini 3 Pro on the SWE-Bench Multilingual benchmark. In video understanding, it beats GPT 5.2 and Claude Opus 4.5 on the VideoMMMU benchmark, which measures reasoning over videos.
A key feature is its ability to accept images or videos as input for coding tasks. A user can show the model an interface from a media file and ask it to build a similar one.
To make these coding capabilities accessible, the company launched an open-source coding tool called Kimi Code. It rivals tools like Claude Code and Gemini CLI. Developers can use Kimi Code through their terminals or integrate it with software like VSCode, Cursor, and Zed. This tool also supports images and videos as input.
Coding tools have become significant revenue drivers for AI companies. Anthropic announced its Claude Code tool reached one billion dollars in annualized recurring revenue, with reports indicating it added another one hundred million by the end of 2025. Moonshot faces competition, as rival Deepseek is expected to release a new model with strong coding abilities soon.
Moonshot AI was founded by former Google and Meta AI researcher Zhilin Yang. The company raised one billion dollars in a Series B round at a two and a half billion dollar valuation. According to reports, it secured another five hundred million in funding last month at a four point three billion dollar valuation and is already seeking a new round at a five billion dollar valuation.