Hey {{first_name | there}},

So something wild just happened. 

We already have our  'world's first AI-native credit card.'

Kimi, the Chinese AI company behind one of the most capable frontier models right now, launched it recently.

Here's how it works: you use the card like any other credit card. You spend money on groceries, coffee, whatever. 

But instead of earning airline miles or cashback percentage points, you earn AI compute tokens - redeemable for Kimi model usage, agent limits, priority access to new model releases, and exclusive AI events.

Right now, the card only works with an 11-digit Chinese mobile number, so it's not globally available. But that's not why this matters.

What matters is where things are heading because this signals a shift we need to talk about.

Think about what Kimi is actually doing here. 

They're not just offering you a feature. They're inserting themselves into the payment layer, the most intimate layer of commercial life. 

Every time you swipe, you're generating data, building habit, and deepening lock-in. And you're being rewarded in a currency that can only be spent inside Kimi's ecosystem.

That's not a product. That's a moat.

For years, fintech tried to disrupt banks from the outside. Kimi is doing something different, using AI as the trojan horse to enter fintech. The credit card is the container. The tokens are the loyalty system. 

The real play is owning the relationship between your money and your AI access.

Earlier generations accumulated airline miles they never redeemed. They kept using the card anyway because the habit was set. If Kimi can create that same habitual loop, spend money, earn AI access, use AI, want more AI access, the credit card is just the activation mechanism for a much deeper dependency.

Consider what's happened in the last 18 months. ChatGPT subscriptions became a professional expense line. Claude API credits became a business cost. 

Grok Imagine Video 1.5 just exited preview and went into production - 720p, 15 seconds of AI video generation, now a commodity creative tool.

Meanwhile, ChatGPT's market share has fallen below 50% for the first time, sitting at 46.4%, with Gemini at 27.7% and Claude at 10.3%.

What does it mean when AI tools are abundant enough that ChatGPT can't hold a majority? It means the real competition isn't between models anymore. 

It's between ecosystems.

Google gives you Gemini because you're already inside Google's ecosystem. Apple will give you its AI because you're on an iPhone with Apple Pay. Kimi is giving you tokens because you're spending on their credit card.

The model is becoming the reward. And rewards are how companies create behavioral lock-in.

If you're building an AI product right now, you're competing in a world where large companies are actively making AI access cheaper, or entirely free, as a retention strategy. 

That puts pressure on any standalone AI tool that charges purely for model access.

A few things worth thinking about:

Bundling is the new moat. The best AI businesses of the next three years probably won't be pure-play model companies. They'll bundle AI access with something people already need- payments, storage, communication, workflow.

Tokens are the new loyalty points. The Kimi credit card is the first visible sign of this. It won't be the last.

The attention economy is becoming the access economy. Whoever controls access to compute, to models, to agents, controls the relationship.

Kimi figured that out and decided the fastest way to own access was to put it on a credit card.

I genuinely don't know if that's genius or dystopian. Maybe both.

Would you use an AI credit card if it gave you meaningful compute credits? Be honest.

— Aashish

AI is moving fast and most people are falling behind. 

The Rundown AI keeps you ahead of the curve. 

It's a free AI newsletter that keeps you up-to-date on the latest AI news, and teaches you how to apply it in just 5 minutes a day.

Plus, complete the quiz after signing up and they’ll recommend the best AI tools, guides, and courses — tailored to your needs.

Sign up to start learning.