ByteDance is training an AI model with as many as 10 trillion parameters that could be close to the size of Anthropic’s cutting-edge Mythos system, the Financial Times reported on Friday, citing people with knowledge of the matter.

With 10 trillion parameters, the model would be more than three times the size of Chinese start-up Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3, which has 2.8 trillion parameters.

An AI model’s parameters refer to the numerical settings a model learns from data to recognise patterns, generate answers and carry out tasks. They are often used as a rough measure of scale, though not necessarily capability.

ByteDance did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Before Kimi K3’s release, Meituan’s LongCat-2.0 and DeepSeek’s V4-Pro led China’s AI industry with 1.6 trillion total parameters, while several ⁠other domestic rivals have passed the trillion-parameter threshold.

But direct comparisons with leading US AI models are difficult because companies such as Anthropic and OpenAI do not disclose the parameter counts for systems including Fable, Mythos or GPT-5.5.

Global race

According to FT, industry estimates say Anthropic’s most advanced Mythos 5 has about eight trillion parameters and Fable 5 about five trillion, making ByteDance’s new AI model close to the size of Mythos.

The news comes as Chinese tech firms continue to accelerate their model release cycles to keep up with the intensifying global AI race, battling with US rivals to build more powerful systems without making them prohibitively expensive to run.

Read: China weighs blocking the West from its best AI

The ByteDance model is currently undergoing pre-training, a process that typically lasts three to six months, before it can be fine-tuned and released, the FT report said. — Ananya Palyekar, (c) 2026 Reuters