Recently, multiple developers have reported that the U.S.-based programming assistant Cursor has announced that it will restrict access to models in certain regions and has initiated a corresponding refund process. This move has attracted widespread attention and quickly driven a large number of users to alternative solutions such as Kimi K2 from Moonshot AI.
According to the latest data from OpenRouter disclosed by Moonshot AI, the usage of Kimi K2 has surged, with daily counts exceeding 10 billion tokens, ranking among the top two on the OpenRouter growth chart alongside Grok-4, recently launched by Elon Musk. This indicates that, in the context of global developers increasingly focusing on the stability, cost-effectiveness, and accessibility of large models, Kimi K2 is rapidly capturing market share.
In addition to its access advantages, Kimi K2's highly competitive pricing strategy is also one of the key factors behind its rapid rise: its API price is only one-fifth of the mid-sized model Sonnet from Claude, and one-twenty-fifth of the large model Opus from Claude, making it highly attractive to budget-sensitive developers and small teams.
The geographical restrictions imposed by Cursor are seen as a microcosm of the current conflict between geopolitical policies and technological commercialization. As model usage permissions and application scenarios gradually become limited, the demand for localized alternative products has rapidly increased, creating a development window for domestic large models like Kimi K2.
Industry insiders point out that Kimi K2 not only provides stable and cost-effective APIs, but also performs outstandingly in multiple scenarios such as intelligent programming, content generation, and semantic search, and is expected to further solidify its position in the global competition of AI models.
