Here's a serious and thorough post about the state of affairs at @Kimi_Moonshot and more importantly the possible causes. This is a long post, built on more than a decade of experience. I have been roasting them for the past two days, but a month ago I also defended them when Anthropic said they routed Kimi user requests to Opus - see my Articles. First, let's start with an overview of what Moonshot has done to its users over the past 6 months: - Cut Kimi plan quotas so bad after the K2.7 and K3 releases that they're all unusable and basically scams. OpenAI's cuts are bad; Kimi's are twice as bad - Released K3 in July with a campaign of unmarked, sponsored influencer post with faked videos of what their model had supposedly produced - I called it out then, too - Price fixed Kimi K3: inference providers in the US and EU are not allowed to set their own prices but must follow the minimum prices set by Moonshot. This is illegal in every functioning country; Apple got convicted for this with their ebook pricing, remember? - Stole the open source code from Cua, relabelled it and claimed they had invented computer use in their Kimi agent - Released K3.1 with another unmarked influencer campaign, with more fake videos - Tampered with K3.1 benchmark scores for DeepSeek in their release materials When you look at the above, you see that these are pretty serious things that could break any brand. If you do this, you either have to think your users are stupid, or not care, or be stupid yourself. When it comes international brands selling into China, and Chinese brands selling to international markets, they both exhibit all three characteristics. I've heard to many Europeans talk about their business ideas: just pick a product, slap a European-brand on it, talk about it being from whichever country, and then the Chinese customers will just buy it without thought. This never works, but these entrepreneurs are ignorant, have no will to learn the market, and regard their potential customer base as NPCs. They view China as another world and cannot reason about it, and because they cannot reason about China, they cannot treat it seriously. For this reason, there have been numerous advertising scandals with European brands getting slaughtered online, because their leadership in HQ outside of China made tone dead decisions in their communication. D&G, Prada, Nike, adidas, Arcteryx, there's been too many internet campaigns against brands for their ad campaigns to remember. For most Chinese companies trying to go international, it is the same but in reverse. They do not understand the international markets, they don't care to educate themselves, they see the world outside China as something otherly, and feel shielded from any negative repercussions from far away countries. They see their users as NPCs. If you wanted to get a refund for your Kimi coding plan, what can you really do? Most likely nothing, and your X posts won't get noticed. When it comes to the campaign for the K3.1 launch, Moonshot did a number of things that just spell incompetence: - Create ready made videos for publishing by influencers, this is basically unheard of - Try to hide that posts are sponsored, to generate the impression of organic user feedback - Require approval before publication When you do these kinds of campaigns, you don't ask for approval because you need to trust the creator; otherwise the content suffers. You don't try to hide that videos are sponsored, because the potential backlash for this type of manipulation is 100x worse than the value, as we see now. And well, creating fake videos.... 无语。 Some have speculated that the error is on the side of a marketing agency, but that is unlikely. The brief is always created by the company for the agency, and everything that goes out is approved by the customer. Most likely, the marketing team at Moonshot must have said that doing hidden influence campaigns like this is risky, but could have been forced by leadership who wanted to "ensure ROI" on their marketing investment by controlling content. So what it really comes down to is a company leadership that does not know or care about laws in other markets or does not care about them, feel like this type of manipulation is worth the risk, and see users as NPCs. At the end of the day, this is false advertising and when you combine this with Moonshot's price fixing, it is not just that it is dishonest but it is complete and utter disrespect of laws of other countries - mind you, all of this is certainly illegal in China, too. To close this out, what really needs to happen now is that the price fixing is reported and investigated. Inference providers are clearly not able to push back on Moonshot themselves, as they're in a competition to be able to offer the newest hyped model as soon as possible. Don't ban the models, but hit down hard on illegal business practices by the company.