Misha G.

*TRUMP ON KHARG: I MAY HAVE A PLAN OR I MAY NOT

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.

AMAZON DEVELOPING NEW MOBILE PHONE, ITS FIRST SINCE 2014’S FIRE PHONE, SOURCES SAY

About the Iran war, I think a reporter ought to ask President Trump a simple, short question: "What is the purpose of the war?" I wonder how he'd answer.

I heard an incredible analogy from a VC friend that I can’t stop thinking about. “The moat in software was the cost of building software. And Claude Code just mass produced a bridge.” It’s wild when you think about the impact of this. The SaaS boom produced a few dozen billionaires and a bunch of zero sum winners. But the AI SaaS era will mass produce millionaires. There will be fewer ServiceTitans hitting $5B valuations, and instead there will be 50,000 companies doing $500K-$5M each, run by 1-3 people with deep expertise and huge margins. To be clear, I believe that the total value of software goes up, and the number of companies created goes up exponentially. But the number of people who capture the value also goes up 100x. I don’t believe in the “SaaS is dying” headline, I think it’s missing the point. It’s simply that the power of SaaS is changing hands.

This whole talk of an exit strategy is bizarre. Israel perceives Iran as an existential threat. We can’t trigger regime change there, so we need to make it as militarily weak as possible. The longer it takes for them to regenerate, the better. The more economic woes they have, the more constraints they have on the defense budget, the better. So, we wreak havoc on them. Wreaking havoc for three weeks will achieve better results than wreaking havoc for one week, and wreaking havoc for three months achieves more than for three weeks. We keep going until Trump stops us. There is no need for an “exit strategy”.