Beyond DeepSeek: Moonshot and MiniMax step up as China’s new frontier AI labs

Chinese artificial intelligence start-ups Moonshot AI and MiniMax have emerged as China’s strongest contenders to rival US frontier labs in 2025 – even as DeepSeek has stolen the spotlight as the poster child for the country’s AI ambitions. Moonshot AI, founded by 33-year-old Yang Zhilin, has sharply raised its profile in China’s AI ecosystem with the launch earlier this month of Kimi K2 Thinking, an upgraded reasoning model. The system outperformed OpenAI’s GPT-5 and Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet...