Chinese AI researchers are now using X to share technical details and personal updates, moving away from the narrative that models like Kimi K3 and DeepSeek R1 appeared without context.
A review of the platform shows a steady rise in accounts linked to Chinese artificial intelligence labs. Moonshot AI, the developer behind Kimi K3, has around 30 active profiles on X. This group includes two cofounders, several former employees, and collaborators. These users do not remain silent. They discuss new releases, publish research papers, connect with Western peers, and share information about their personal lives.
Moonshot is the most active lab on the platform, but executives and staff from other major startups, including Minimax and Z.ai, are also present. Some DeepSeek employees, who reportedly cannot leave China because the government has confiscated their passports, regularly post news and job listings to attract new talent.
“X is the best community” for AI discussions right now, says Meng Fanqing, cofounder of Evolvent AI and a former intern at Moonshot. He worked on the Kimi K2.5 model there. “There are both Chinese and overseas audiences, and the recommendation algorithm works pretty well for showing you content in the same circle that you are in,” he says. Compared with domestic platforms, where serious technical debates are often difficult to hold, researchers like Meng prefer to spend their time on X.
Meng began posting actively in mid-2025. The global attention on DeepSeek’s R1 model at the start of that year highlighted China’s industry. Many researchers seized the opportunity to join the conversation. “Around that time, all the Chinese researchers are starting to think about branding on an international level,” Meng says.
Chinese researchers are also filling a gap left by teams at OpenAI and Anthropic. Tiezhen Wang, an independent AI analyst and former researcher at Hugging Face, says these Western companies have become more reluctant to share their thinking online as their firms have grown larger. “I guess they feel that their model architecture and how they train the model is kind of a secret, so they’re posting less,” Wang explains. Consequently, audiences on X who want to understand the fast-moving field of AI are paying more attention to Chinese voices.
Why Choose X?
There is no comparable social platform in China for high-quality technical discussions about artificial intelligence and emerging technologies.
Some users previously posted on Zhihu, a site that once branded itself as the premier destination for educated professionals. Since 2020, however, the platform has increasingly focused on fiction content, and expert contributors have left. Deng Yu, a Chinese mathematician who received a Fields Medal this year, publicly wrote on Zhihu in 2018 that he decided to stop posting there because of the rise of low-quality content.
Xiaohongshu, or RedNote, has become popular among young, urban, and educated classes in China. Some junior AI researchers have opened accounts there to share work details, but the audience is less technical than what they find on X.
When Moonshot published a new research paper in March, it caused a stir on both Chinese and Western social media, even attracting praise from Elon Musk. But “almost everyone on Zhihu and Xiaohongshu were talking about the background and age of the authors—one of them is only 17—and who their parents are, things that I find very superficial and gossipy,” says a current researcher at Moonshot who requested anonymity because he was not authorised to speak to media. “It was the foreign readers who actually discussed technical details and praised its breakthroughs.” He says readers on Zhihu also tend to be more mean-spirited, and the platform is plagued by higher amounts of AI slop than X.
Moonshot did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Chinese newcomers have generally received a warm welcome from academics and researchers at Western AI companies who were already on X. Many of these users have been eager for direct information about Chinese AI labs. “Before they all came to X, we already saw a lot of influential researchers translating Chinese [AI] blogs into English,” says Wang. He points to Su Jianlin, a well-respected AI researcher who keeps an active blog in Chinese documenting his thoughts, as an example of the kind of voices that Western AI communities crave. Now, Su is working for Moonshot and has a public X account, too.
Other Incentives
Beyond the desire to participate in open discussions, Chinese AI companies are finding that X is an effective place to market themselves and their products. “X is the platform with the highest traffic and exposure. To some extent, the AI industry works just like the finance industry now; each individual and company needs their own branding,” says Meng.
When AI researchers become minor social media celebrities, that helps boost the profile of their employers too. Wang says he personally advised Moonshot during a one-off consultation session for the company in 2025 to push more of its researchers to the front on social media. When a startup releases a new model or paper, “it’s more interesting to see what they as a person want to post, instead of the official announcement,” Wang says. “And this would definitely help them gather more feedback from the audience. And they can talk to other researchers and potentially trigger some collaboration.”
Moonshot has already proven that it has an ample supply of charismatic personalities. The company is often described in Chinese media as one of the AI labs with the most interesting internal cultures, where the CEO plastered his office with band posters and other souvenirs celebrating his love for rock music. The Chinese name of the company, 月之暗面, literally comes from Pink Floyd’s album The Dark Side of the Moon.
Having Chinese AI researchers explain their work in their own words on X is a net benefit for the United States, Wang says, because it reduces the need for blind speculation about what Chinese AI labs are doing. “People have a lot of wrong hallucinations about what China is doing. And now, X is the door for them to better understand China,” Wang says.
