From a Beijing lab founded by a young engineer who once turned down Apple to chase something harder, a new AI model called Kimi K3 has arrived free of charge and promptly overwhelmed its own servers with demand — the second time in two years a Chinese startup has upended assumptions about what frontier artificial intelligence requires. The episode deepens a quiet reckoning in Washington and Silicon Valley alike: that restricting hardware may not restrict ideas, and that the gap between American and Chinese AI capability is narrowing in ways that export controls alone cannot explain. What Moons