Kimi K3 went live and first crashed itself, then scared chip stocks into a nosedive. Moonshot AI launched Kimi K3 on July 16, and within 48 hours of going live, demand nearly maxed out its computing power. The official account posted that, to ensure a good experience for existing subscribers, new subscriptions would be temporarily paused. This shock caused the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index, which tracks U.S. chip stocks, to drop over 20% from its June all-time high, entering a technical bear market. Taiwan's Weighted Index also saw a sharp decline on the same day. The scene is reminiscent of the market reaction when Chinese open-source models disrupted OpenAI and Anthropic's profit expectations—a Chinese team managed to create a product that rivals, or even partially surpasses, top-tier closed-source models at a fraction of the expected cost. Benchmark tests show that Kimi K3 has already outperformed Anthropic Opus 4.8 and OpenAI GPT 5.5 in tasks like programming, though it still slightly lags behind Claude Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol. The fully open-source weights are expected to be released on July 27, allowing enterprises to deploy the model themselves without subscription limits.