(Yicai) April 21 -- Chinese artificial intelligence startup Moonshot AI launched Kimi K2.6, the latest addition to its Kimi series of open-source large language models, today. The new model is designed to strengthen performance in coding, long-horizon task execution and multi-agent clustering capabilities.

The Kimi K2.6 model can handle continuous coding for up to 13 hours, according to official disclosures. Its agent cluster can support 300 sub-agents working in parallel across 4,000 collaborative steps and its autonomous agents can perform persistent automated executions and are compatible with popular frameworks such as OpenClaw and the Hermes Agent.

These improvements aim to address earlier limitations in large models, which could only generate short code snippets and struggled with complex software engineering tasks. These early models often suffered from broken context and inconsistent logic.

The upgrades in the Kimi series are not an isolated case but reflect a broader shift among leading AI developers worldwide, reflecting the industry's transition from competing on general capabilities to competing on real-world, task-execution performance.

For instance, Anthropic’s Claude Code can complete specific tasks involving a 12.5-million-line codebase in just seven hours. OpenAI’s Agent Swarm architecture supports multi-agent collaboration for complex research tasks and Zhipu·AI's flagship open-source model, released earlier this month, focuses on long-range task capabilities.

Alongside its ongoing product upgrades, Moonshot AI is also advancing its fundraising strategies in both the primary and secondary markets. The Beijing-based company is preparing for an initial public offering in Hong Kong while also seeking a new funding round of approximately USD1 billion, industry sources say. Moonshot AI has yet to comment on these reports.

After its latest funding round in February, Moonshot AI's valuation rose to USD10 billion, although it still trails listed rival Zhipu·AI, which had a market capitalization of HKD434.7 billion (USD55.5 billion) as of the close of markets yesterday. Bloomberg previously reported that Moonshot AI is planning a pre-IPO fundraising round with an estimated valuation of USD18 billion to bolster its capital reserves.

Editor: Kim Taylor