Harvey rebuilt on Moonshot's Kimi K3 and its margins turned positive again.

A $15.6 billion startup losing money on every query

Harvey, the legal-AI company valued at $15.6 billion, watched its gross margin slide from about 50 percent at the start of the year to minus 50 percent by June, after a March update to its agents sent usage soaring, according to a person familiar with the numbers ¹. Token consumption is up twentyfold this year, the company says ¹. The rented models did the damage: OpenAI and Anthropic now bill enterprises for usage on top of base subscription fees, pricing that had already burned Uber's full-year AI budget by April ¹.

The escape route runs through Beijing

Harvey's August fix is a model post-trained on Kimi K3, the 2.8-trillion-parameter open-weight release from China's Moonshot AI, and its margins turned positive again ¹. Abridge now builds on Nvidia's open weights, Decagon routes 80 percent of customer queries through its own models, and Ramp, which raised $750 million in June, is weighing training for the first time ¹. The quiet collectors sit below the headlines. Modal, Fireworks AI and Baseten host Kimi K3 at roughly $3 per million input tokens and $15 per million output, on Nvidia GB300 and AMD MI350X hardware that export controls keep from Chinese firms, sold with zero-data-retention terms and US endpoints↗ ². No public account names Harvey's host; the layer collects whoever defects.

"Cosplay," until it saves the margin

Menlo Ventures partner Matt Kraning calls most custom-model talk "a lot of cosplay," and Salespeak abandoned its own model-building effort after seeing no major advantage ¹. US security agencies accuse Moonshot of distilling American models, and Rogo has had to walk large customers past their hesitation about Chinese weights ¹. Even Anthropic's own investor-forum slide↗ concedes Harvey still needs Opus for its hardest tasks ¹. The frontier stays rented; the volume work leaks.

Cut off the week of the summit

OpenAI will end SpaceX-owned Cursor's model access on 12 November, citing past contract violations by Elon Musk's companies, weeks after investors floated a $1.2 trillion valuation ahead of an IPO expected next year ⁴⁵. Nothing argues for hedging harder than a supplier who can quit. Xi Jinping meets Donald Trump in Washington this week with artificial intelligence on the agenda and Sam Altman and Jensen Huang at the state dinner ⁶. Watch whether the compliant American wrapper around Beijing's biggest open model survives the summit.