MarkdownLM

🚨NEWS: Cursor’s $50B “in-house model” is literally Kimi K2.5 with RL on top. Got caught in 24 hours >be Moonshot AI >spend hundreds of millions training Kimi K2.5 >1 trillion parameters, 15 trillion tokens, agent swarm architecture >beat GPT-5.2 and Opus 4.5 on real benchmarks >open-source it because you believe in the ecosystem >one condition: display “Kimi K2.5” if you make over $20M/month from it >Cursor takes the model >runs RL on coding tasks >ships it March 19 as “Composer 2” >blog post: “continued pretraining + scaled reinforcement learning” >zero mention of Kimi K2.5 >“our in-house models generate more code than almost any other LLMs in the world” >publishes benchmark chart >Composer 2 against Opus 4.6 and GPT-5.4 >uses the chart to justify raising at $50 billion! >less than 24 hours later >kimi dev intercepts the API response >model ID: kimi-k2p5-rl-0317-s515-fast >they didn’t even rename it >Moonshot head of pretraining runs tokenizer test >confirms: identical to Kimi’s tokenizer >publicly tags Cursor’s co-founder: “why aren’t you respecting our license?” >two more Moonshot employees post confirmations >all three posts deleted within hours >legal is now involved >but it gets worse >Cursor had Kimi K2.5 listed as a FREE model in their UI just weeks ago >users were openly using it >Feb 9: “K2.5 was in my model list. I updated and it vanished” >it vanished because Cursor pulled it from the picker, and relaunched it as their own model >Moonshot valuation: $4.3B >Cursor valuation: $50B Absolute state of Cursor.

We've evaluated a lot of base models on perplexity-based evals and Kimi k2.5 proved to be the strongest! After that, we do continued pre-training and high-compute RL (a 4x scale-up). The combination of the strong base, CPT and RL, and Fireworks' inference and RL samplers make Composer-2 frontier level. It was a miss to not mention the Kimi base in our blog from the start. We'll fix that for the next model.

Cursor is raising at a $50 billion valuation on the claim that its “in-house models generate more code than almost any other LLMs in the world.” Less than 24 hours after launching Composer 2, a developer found the model ID in the API response: kimi-k2p5-rl-0317-s515-fast. That’s Moonshot AI’s Kimi K2.5 with reinforcement learning appended. A developer named Fynn was testing Cursor’s OpenAI-compatible base URL when the identifier leaked through the response headers. Moonshot’s head of pretraining, Yulun Du, confirmed on X that the tokenizer is identical to Kimi’s and questioned Cursor’s license compliance. Two other Moonshot employees posted confirmations. All three posts have since been deleted. This is the second time. When Cursor launched Composer 1 in October 2025, users across multiple countries reported the model spontaneously switching its inner monologue to Chinese mid-session. Kenneth Auchenberg, a partner at Alley Corp, posted a screenshot calling it a smoking gun. KR-Asia and 36Kr confirmed both Cursor and Windsurf were running fine-tuned Chinese open-weight models underneath. Cursor never disclosed what Composer 1 was built on. They shipped Composer 1.5 in February and moved on. The pattern: take a Chinese open-weight model, run RL on coding tasks, ship it as a proprietary breakthrough, publish a cost-performance chart comparing yourself against Opus 4.6 and GPT-5.4 without disclosing that your base model was free, then raise another round. That chart from the Composer 2 announcement deserves its own paragraph. Cursor plotted Composer 2 against frontier models on a price-vs-quality axis to argue they’d hit a superior tradeoff. What the chart doesn’t show is that Anthropic and OpenAI trained their models from scratch. Cursor took an open-weight model that Moonshot spent hundreds of millions developing, ran RL on top, and presented the output as evidence of in-house research. That’s margin arbitrage on someone else’s R&D dressed up as a benchmark slide. The license makes this more than an attribution oversight. Kimi K2.5 ships under a Modified MIT License with one clause designed for exactly this scenario: if your product exceeds $20 million in monthly revenue, you must prominently display “Kimi K2.5” on the user interface. Cursor’s ARR crossed $2 billion in February. That’s roughly $167 million per month, 8x the threshold. The clause covers derivative works explicitly. Cursor is valued at $29.3 billion and raising at $50 billion. Moonshot’s last reported valuation was $4.3 billion. The company worth 12x more took the smaller company’s model and shipped it as proprietary technology to justify a valuation built on the frontier lab narrative. Three Composer releases in five months. Composer 1 caught speaking Chinese. Composer 2 caught with a Kimi model ID in the API. A P0 incident this year. And a benchmark chart that compares an RL fine-tune against models requiring billions in training compute without disclosing the base was free. The question for investors in the $50 billion round: what exactly are you buying? A VS Code fork with strong distribution, or a frontier research lab? The model ID in the API answers that. If Moonshot doesn’t enforce this license against a company generating $2 billion annually from a derivative of their model, the attribution clause becomes decoration for every future open-weight release. Every AI lab watching this is running the same math: why open-source your model if companies with better distribution can strip attribution, call it proprietary, and raise at 12x your valuation? kimi-k2p5-rl-0317-s515-fast is the most expensive model ID leak in the history of AI licensing.

was messing with the OpenAI base URL in Cursor and caught this accounts/anysphere/models/kimi-k2p5-rl-0317-s515-fast so composer 2 is just Kimi K2.5 with RL at least rename the model ID

Composer 2 is now available in Cursor.

why everyone hates YC companies

Until today, Claude Code has been absolutely crushing every task I've given it. Now it seems it can't put anything together without tons of hand-holding. I'm using Opus 4.6 in big brain mode.