Exclusive: Paying for frontier AI models buys 4-month head start at 5x the cost

A Mozilla report finds the performance gap between US closed frontier AI models and Chinese open-weights models has shrunk to 4.4 months. Open models like Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 offer near-top performance at a fraction of the cost, prompting many companies to prefer them for routine tasks. Closed models still justify higher prices for specialized, high-intensity workloads due to ease of use and compliance support.