# Cursor Admits New Composer 2 Coding Model Was Built on Chinese AI Kimi K2.5

_Monday, March 23, 2026 at 10:06 PM EDT · AI · Latest · Tier 1 — Major_

![Cursor Admits New Composer 2 Coding Model Was Built on Chinese AI Kimi K2.5 — Primary](https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/opengraph-image.png?w=1200)

Cursor quietly launched Composer 2, a new coding model it described as frontier-level intelligence, without disclosing it was built on top of Kimi K2.5, an open-source model from Moonshot AI, a Chinese startup backed by Alibaba, Tencent, and HongShan (formerly Sequoia China).

A developer named Fynn uncovered the connection by routing Cursor's API traffic through a debug proxy and finding the model ID in plain text. Cursor co-founder Aman Sanger acknowledged the omission was a mistake. VP of Developer Education Lee Robinson confirmed about a quarter of the model's compute derives from the Kimi base.

Kimi K2.5 is a 1 trillion parameter mixture-of-experts model with 32 billion active parameters, a 256,000-token context window, and native image and video support.

The disclosure raises broader questions about how many Western AI products are built on Chinese open-source foundations, especially as export controls and AI sovereignty concerns intensify.

Sources: TechCrunch, VentureBeat

## Sources

- [TechCrunch](https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/22/cursor-admits-its-new-coding-model-was-built-on-top-of-moonshot-ais-kimi/)
- [VentureBeat](https://venturebeat.com/technology/cursors-composer-2-was-secretly-built-on-a-chinese-ai-model-and-it-exposes-a)

---
Canonical: https://techandbusiness.org/newswire/LlReJGxHJ5ZpQFIzav1hy9
Retrieved: 2026-05-10T00:30:28.206Z
Publisher: Tech & Business (techandbusiness.org)