• Cursor left out one key detail about its new coding model: it started from Kimi K2.5.
• Composer 2 is cheaper, more capable — and built on a Chinese open-source model, Cursor's executives said.
• An X user spotted code suggesting Kimi under the hood, sparking disclosure.

Cursor just acknowledged that its latest coding model has Chinese roots — a detail it left out the first time around.

In a series of posts on X over the weekend, Cursor executives said Composer 2 was initially built on top of Kimi K2.5, an open-source model developed by Chinese startup Moonshot AI.

"We've evaluated a lot of base models on perplexity-based evals and Kimi k2.5 proved to be the strongest!" said Cursor's cofounder Aman Sanger on X on Saturday.

"It was a miss to not mention the Kimi base in our blog from the start," he added.

The disclosure appears to have been sparked by an X user named Fynn, who posted on Friday that Composer 2 was "just Kimi 2.5" with additional reinforcement learning.

To support the claim, the user pointed to code snippets that appeared to reference Kimi as the underlying system.

'At least rename the model ID," the user wrote.

In response to the user's X post, Cursor's vice president of developer education, Lee Robinson, acknowledged that Composer 2 was built on Kimi K2.5 as an open-source base.

"We will do full pretraining in the future," Robinson said.

"Only ~1/4 of the compute spent on the final model came from the base, the rest is from our training," he added.

Robinson also said the company is complying with the model's licensing terms through its inference provider.

The Chinese startup posted on X on Saturday that Cursor is using Kimi K2.5 under an authorized commercial partnership.

"Seeing our model integrated effectively through Cursor's continued pretraining & high-compute RL training is the open model ecosystem we love to support," the post read.

Cursor was last valued at $29.3 billion in November.

Cursor's new model is cheaper and better

Cursor said in a blog post on Thursday that Composer 2 is "frontier-level at coding" and priced at $0.50 per million input tokens and $2.50 per million output tokens, calling it "a new, optimal combination of intelligence and cost."

By comparison, Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6 is priced at $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens, while Claude Sonnet 4.6 costs $3 and $15, respectively, according to the company's website.

That puts Composer 2 at roughly one-tenth the cost of Opus 4.6 and about one-sixth the cost of Sonnet 4.6 on both input and output tokens.

Users on X have added to the debate, with some praising the performance of Kimi after learning that Composer 2 was built on top of it.

"As someone who basically lives in opus 4.6, seeing an open-weight kimi 2.5 fine-tune actually beat it on coding benchmarks is wild," one X user wrote in response to Fynn's post.

"Well that's a sign for RL Chinese is in new game," another user wrote, referring to reinforcement learning.

Others were more critical of Cursor's handling of the disclosure, questioning why the company did not acknowledge Kimi upfront.

"Cursor is becoming a model routing layer, not an IDE. they pick the cheapest model that clears a quality bar per task, wrap it in their UX, and pocket the margin," one user who goes by aira wrote on X.

• Amid China's OpenClaw craze, the AI agent is now moving into robots.
• China's tech giants have begun launching their own versions of OpenClaw in the past weeks.
• Meanwhile, the US is still concerned about AI agents going rogue.

While much of the world is still experimenting with OpenClaw, China is already putting it into robots.

Chinese home robotics giant Ecovacs unveiled its new robot, Bajie, powered by OpenClaw, at a consumer electronics expo in Shanghai last week.

Advertised as a home "butler," the robot can perform household tasks such as tidying shoes or putting away toys.

Ecovacs founder Qian Dongqi said in an interview with Chinese outlet Ifeng that the long-term goal is for robots like Bajie to take on more household chores.

A writer from the Chinese tech outlet 36Kr who saw the robot in action reported that it required multiple prompts to complete tasks and "there were also unstable situations."

It's not just home robots. Developers have begun integrating OpenClaw into Chinese robot-maker Unitree's G1 humanoid robot, allowing it to interpret commands and navigate physical spaces in real time. A US-based team, Dimensional, has open-sourced the system behind these integrations.

Another Chinese company, AgileX Robotics, earlier this month published a guide showing how OpenClaw can be integrated with its robotic arm, letting users control the machine through natural language.

Chinese tech giant Xiaomi is also testing its version of OpenClaw across its ecosystem, from smartphones to smart home devices.

China has been gripped by an OpenClaw craze lately. Users rushed to install the AI agent on their devices, with some paying strangers to set it up for them and others forming long queues outside Tencent's Shenzhen headquarters and Baidu's Beijing office to get help from engineers.

The OpenClaw obsession is partly driven by the viral phrase "raising the lobster," which Chinese users use to describe deploying the AI agent to automate everyday tasks.

To meet the demand for AI agents, China's tech giants, including Tencent, Alibaba, and ByteDance, have begun launching their own versions of OpenClaw in the past few weeks.

US concerns about security

Meanwhile, in the US, concerns about AI agents going rogue continue to grow.

Last month, Meta's alignment director, Summer Yue, connected OpenClaw to her inbox, and said in an X post that the bot tried to delete her emails.

"I had to RUN to my Mac mini like I was defusing a bomb," Yue wrote on X.

In a separate incident, an AI agent set off a major internal security alert at Meta after acting without approval, exposing sensitive company and user data to staff who weren't authorised to see it, The Information reported on Thursday.

Tech leaders have also sounded alarms. Elon Musk last month posted an image of a monkey being handed a rifle on X, captioning it: "People giving OpenClaw root access to their entire life."

Even Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who has praised the technology, has emphasized the need for stronger safeguards. His company is working on its own agent system, NemoClaw, with a focus on security.

• China's biggest tech names all want a piece of OpenClaw.
• Tencent, Alibaba, ByteDance, and others have launched versions of the AI agent and integrations.
• OpenClaw took China by storm in recent weeks as the phrase "raising the lobster" trended online.

The "lobster" craze in China has quickly turned into a corporate land grab.

Within weeks of OpenClaw gaining traction among developers and hobbyists, China's internet giants began rolling out their own versions of the AI agent and integrations.

Tencent launched QClaw last week, a tool that integrates OpenClaw into WeChat's vast ecosystem, China's super app. Users can send a message directly to QClaw via WeChat, and the agent will immediately execute the task, Tencent said on its website.

TikTok owner ByteDance's cloud unit, Volcano Engine, rolled out ArkClaw, a cloud-based version of OpenClaw accessible through a web browser. Alibaba also introduced JVS Claw, a mobile app designed to help users install and deploy OpenClaw more easily.

Xiaomi, a consumer electronics company, has launched a closed beta test of MiClaw, an AI agent that lets users control Xiaomi smartphones and smart home devices with single-sentence commands.

AI startups moved just as fast. Zhipu AI, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax have released large language models or frameworks built on top of OpenClaw. Shares of Zhipu AI and MiniMax surged 13 per cent and 22 per cent respectively last Tuesday, following the announcements of their OpenClaw tools.

It's not just Chinese companies. Nvidia on Monday announced that it has created NemoClaw, an enterprise platform built on top of OpenClaw.

"It has a network guardrail, it has a privacy router, and as a result, we could protect and keep the claws from executing inside our company, and do it safely," CEO Jensen Huang said during Nvidia's 2026 GTC conference in San Jose on Monday.

"Every company in the world today needs to have an OpenClaw strategy, an agentic system strategy," he added. "This is the new computer."

OpenClaw has taken China by storm. The trending phrase "raising the lobster" went viral, as Chinese social media users used it to describe deploying the AI agent to automate everyday tasks.

People across China also rushed to install OpenClaw on their devices, forming queues outside Tencent's Shenzhen headquarters and Baidu's Beijing office to seek help from engineers. Others turned to online marketplaces, paying strangers to install the tool for them.

The frenzy has since been tempered by growing security concerns. In the past week, some users have begun removing the software — in some cases, even paying others to uninstall it.

Earlier in February, China's National Vulnerability Database, run by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, warned that the open-source agent could introduce security risks if not properly configured. Misconfigured deployments could leave systems exposed to cyberattacks or data breaches, it said.

Last week, Chinese government agencies and state-owned firms moved to curb the use of OpenClaw on work devices.

Do you have a story to share about tech in China? Contact this reporter at cmlee@businessinsider.com.

• I studied at universities in both the US and China, first in 2015 and again in 2025.
• Experiencing Chinese higher education at two different times showed me how different the system is.
• The differences in cost, campus culture, and career pathways made me rethink American universities.

I've done something quite rare: I'm an American who attended college in both the US and China.

I completed my undergraduate degree in political science at a state university in New York and studied abroad in Wuhan, China, during the summer of 2015. Ten years later, in 2025, I returned to Shijiazhuang, China, while completing my second graduate degree in global health, interning at a medical university.

Experiencing Chinese universities at two distinct points in my life, a decade apart, gave me a rare view of how the system operates and how it has evolved.

I didn't meet any Americans studying in China most recently

During my first trip, I was in a group of about 30 American college students. The second time, I was the only person from my cohort to go.

Since the pandemic, the number of US students in China has dropped, according to NPR. In fact, I didn't meet a single American in the three months I was in the country most recently.

Both times, I met lots of African students, though. They were heavily invested in and integrated into the Chinese learning and working systems.

I've noticed China sets the international students I met up for success

Many of the international students I talked to in the US told me how hard it was to integrate and find a pathway to work after school in New York.

In China, I noticed there's a pathway for international students who want to stay, particularly those who have developed strong Mandarin skills.

The Chinese government and universities are actively trying to entice international students to come to the country, while also investing in ways to retain graduates.

Campus life looks very different from what I experienced in the US

The internet firewall in China can make research difficult, and I've seen doctors smoking in classrooms between lectures.

Student life also reflects a different set of norms. There is low tolerance for drugs and alcohol on many Chinese campuses. After class, I saw friends playing badminton rather than drinking beer.

Technology and security are also visible on campus. Students on the campuses I studied entered by scanning their faces and were tracked by cameras.

Politics also felt more openly present in academic life. Most of the professors and physicians I worked with were active members of the Communist Party and often wore pins on their lapels to signify it.

As one local friend put it, "having one state party means policies don't change every four years," which, in their view, can create a certain level of stability for universities.

Chinese universities are far cheaper and more specialized

The two universities I studied at in China didn't have the fancy sports facilities most American colleges do, but many students I met weren't going into debt to study either.

Tuition in China is subsidized by the government, especially at public universities. That means it's relatively affordable compared with many Western countries.

Housing and food costs are also inexpensive in my experience. I was eating a healthy lunch on campus for $1 a day. My American campus used to sell a single banana for $1.05 in 2015.

I also spent a year taking general courses in America. While I loved taking a class on Bollywood as a political science major, the specialization offered by many Chinese universities helped better prepare me for the real world. I also saved money by not taking general courses while in China.

Studying in both systems changed how I think about education

I didn't just earn my degrees in multiple countries; I learned about the culture of education. I learned how the government impacts who can study what and if they will be successful.

I'll always be partial to the American scholastic mentality of questioning everything and forming opinions, rather than the rote memorization I saw in China, but I'd prefer not to be launched into the working world with so much student loan debt.

I hope more Americans can form their own opinions of China's educational system, which has rapidly evolved and will only continue to grow in its unique way.