Kimi K3 shock: $392 billion now wiped from expected valuations of OpenAI and Anthropic

Kimi K3 challenges assumptions around US AI leadership

Despite some dip-buying in tech stocks on Wall Street overnight and a rebound in the Korean stock market (KOSPI) today after a shaky start, the implied valuations of Anthropic and OpenAI continue to come under pressure. The trigger was Friday's release of Chinese startup Moonshot AI's new Kimi K3 model.

By early accounts, Kimi K3 is already competitive with America's best closed systems and is challenging the long-held view that United States (US) frontier models enjoyed a comfortable six-to-nine-month lead over their Chinese counterparts.

What makes Kimi K3 particularly disruptive is that it's an open-weight model. Once the full weights are released, anyone with sufficient compute can download, run, modify, and fine-tune it – essentially democratising frontier-level performance.

By contrast, OpenAI and Anthropic operate closed, proprietary systems. Users can only access them via API or hosted platforms, with no ability to self-host at scale or customise the underlying model. You're locked into their pricing, policies, and rate limits.

Kimi's emergence is therefore raising serious questions around the business models of OpenAI and Anthropic – and it's already showing up in IG's pre-initial public offering (IPO) markets, which reflect their expected Day 1 market caps at the close of business (COB).

Billions wiped from valuations

• Anthropic's pre-IPO implied market capitalisation (which peaked at $2.22 trillion in early June) last traded at $1.557 trillion, down from Thursday's pre-Kimi close of $1.789 trillion – a loss of ~$232 billion.
• OpenAI's pre-IPO implied market capitalisation (which peaked at $1.75 trillion in mid-June) last traded at $1.163 trillion, down from Thursday's pre-Kimi close of $1.322 trillion – a loss of ~$160 billion.

All up, roughly $392 billion has been wiped from the combined implied market capitalisations of the two US leaders since Thursday. That represents an increase of $78 billion in losses over the past 24 hours alone.

All of this is now calling the business models of OpenAI and Anthropic into serious question. If high-performing frontier AI can be accessed as an open-weight model, the case for sky-high private valuations and massive IPOs becomes much harder to justify. It also casts real doubt on the idea that America can simply ‘win’ the AI race through closed, proprietary systems, which in turn raises some big questions for policymakers in Washington.

Anthropic IPO daily chart

OpenAI IPO daily chart  

• _{Source: TradingView. The figures stated are as of 21 July 2026 Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future performance. This report does not contain and is not to be taken as containing any financial product advice or financial product recommendation.}