The launch of Kimi K3, the new open model from China’s Moonshot AI, coincided with a historic drop in semiconductor stocks and put Wall Street on edge once again. According to Fortune, the Philadelphia chip index lost as much as 5.7% in a single day and closed its worst week since April 2025 (‑11%), down 20% from its late-June peak. Amid the tremor, Apple briefly overtook Nvidia as the world’s most valuable company.
Kimi K3 is a 2.8-trillion-parameter model that, according to Moonshot, outperforms Claude Fable 5 on programming tasks at a fraction of the price, and, because it is open, anyone can download and use it. It is the second time in eighteen months that a cheaper Chinese model has shaken the valuations of the entire US AI supply chain: the market is reading it as a replay of the “DeepSeek moment.” For Latin America, the episode cuts both ways. On one hand, it validates the access argument: cheap open models lower the barrier to entry compared with the premium prices of US labs, something especially relevant for countries that are not going to build their own frontier models. On the other, the first public crack in confidence in the capital that sustains the global compute infrastructure is a reminder of how fragile the ground under this entire race can be.
Also today
- The White House weighs a FINRA-style AI regulator — the US Treasury is formally studying a body that would evaluate models before deployment; curiously, Altman, Nadella and Musk back the proposal of their rival Demis Hassabis, who would be the one overseeing them.
- Anthropic and Meta negotiate a compute deal worth up to $10 billion — Anthropic’s shortage of computing capacity keeps weaving cross alliances between labs and Big Tech.
- Apple expands its litigation against OpenAI — it sent legal preservation letters to about 40 former employees, a procedural escalation that puts pressure on OpenAI just as it prepares its IPO.
- Elon Musk confirms that Grok 4.6 is already in training — a 2-trillion-parameter model announced just days after the release of Grok 4.5: the pace of iteration is dizzying.
- Brendi, a Brazilian startup for AI-powered WhatsApp ordering, raises $6.6 million — it serves 7,100 restaurants and processes 420,000 orders per week, with the co-founder of iFood among its angel investors.
In the region
The AI governance map for Latin America is not only being drawn far from the region; it is also fracturing it: Brazil joined the China-led WAICO, while Argentina, Chile, Costa Rica, El Salvador and Panama remain in the US-led Pax Silica bloc, with no coordinated regional position. In parallel, the region’s own agenda moves at its own pace: Brazil formalized its Parliamentary Front on AI in a special session of the Senate, Mexico opened a formal debate in the Chamber of Deputies on a regulatory framework, which could unfreeze dozens of initiatives stalled since 2023, and Panama announced it will launch its National AI Strategy on July 30. In the most concrete trenches, the High Court of Justice of the City of Buenos Aires awarded an AI tender to automate court procedures, with a five-year contract.
Threads we’re following
This adds to a story we have been following: two global AI rule-making clubs, the US one and the Chinese one, competing for Latin America without really giving it a seat at the table. Today’s news is that the dispute is no longer only diplomatic: with Kimi K3, the price advantage of Chinese open models has also become a market argument, and that makes the decision of whom to align with even more fraught for the region.
If technological sovereignty meant adopting cheap open models, does it make sense for the region to embrace them even if that means swapping a dependence on the United States for one on China, or is the real risk being left out of both blocs?
About this entry. It is generated automatically from public sources, without human review before publication. It may contain errors of interpretation or summary; please check each story against its original source (the links lead there) before citing it or making decisions based on it.
Doble Click is written with Anthropic models.