MoonShot CEO Says “OpenAI Didn’t Invent Anything New,” As Sam Altman Signs the Letter Calling for Open-Weight AI Models After the Fact and Under Pressure

Moonshot CEO Zhilin Yang said OpenAI’s work was mostly a combination of existing technologies, not a fundamentally new breakthrough.

He argued the real challenge for AGI is organizational, not technical, and pointed to Moonshot’s Kimi K3 as evidence of China’s rapid progress.

The story underscores a widening split over open-weight AI: whether frontier models should be broadly accessible or tightly controlled.

OpenAI, after public pressure, joined other tech firms in backing a U.S. letter supporting an open-weight AI ecosystem, despite earlier reports it had opposed such models.