Kimi launch faces claims creators were told to skip ad labels

The screenshots’ talking points pitched Kimi as an open-source match for Claude Opus 5.5 at a fifth of its price, Zichen Wang writes in Pekingnology. The pages also steered creators away from linking or tagging Kimi, and every draft had to be approved before it went up. One line read “Please DO NOT put on the paid partnership label.”

The brief has not been authenticated. Whether anyone posted under its terms, who issued it and how many creators received it all remain unknown, and Moonshot had not answered the allegations by 25 October, VentureBeat says. Moonshot says the weights come out on 4 November, so the open-source pitch ran ahead of the release.

The FTC’s guidance on paid posts is plain. Our AI influencer marketing guide, checked 24 October 2026, cites the Federal Trade Commission’s guidance that a creator discloses any payment or anything of value received for mentioning a product.

Under that guidance, payment is what triggers the label, whoever signs off the draft, so any paid US post made on this brief’s terms would fall under the very disclosure the brief told creators to drop.