Moonshot AI, a Beijing-based artificial intelligence laboratory, has made the weights of its Kimi K3 large language model available for public download. The model boasts 2.8 trillion parameters and a context window capable of processing one million tokens. This release makes Kimi K3 the largest open-weight model publicly accessible. The company stated its intention to increase user base through broad availability, contrasting with proprietary systems in the United States.
The release of Kimi K3's weights follows its initial API and consumer application launch on July 16, 2026. Benchmarks from Arena blind evaluations indicated that developers preferred Kimi K3 over leading U.S. models for front-end coding tasks. The model's performance placed it below Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 and OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol in overall rankings but ahead of their previous generation models in coding and general agent evaluations. Moonshot AI has positioned Kimi K3 as a competitor to models like Claude Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol.
Kimi K3 utilizes novel architectural components, including Kimi Delta Attention (KDA) and Attention Residuals (AttnRes), designed for efficient handling of long sequences and complex reasoning. It also features native multimodal capabilities, allowing it to process images alongside text. The model's API pricing is set at $3.00 per million input tokens and $15.00 per million output tokens. A significant discount of 90% is applied to input tokens when cached, reducing the cost to $0.30 per million. This pricing structure positions Kimi K3 as a capability-priced model rather than a budget alternative.
The availability of Kimi K3's weights is expected to benefit cloud computing providers specializing in hosting third-party open models. However, major cloud platforms such as Amazon AWS Bedrock, Microsoft Azure Foundry, and Google Vertex AI have not yet integrated Kimi K3 or comparable Chinese open-weight models into their offerings.
The launch of Kimi K3 has generated attention amid scrutiny from Washington. U.S. officials have accused Moonshot AI of training K3 using restricted Nvidia chips and conducting large-scale distillation against U.S. models. Moonshot AI has not publicly responded to these allegations.
Moonshot AI, founded in March 2023, has seen significant revenue growth. The company reported $300 million in annual recurring revenue in June 2026, up from $200 million in April 2026. It is reportedly seeking a new funding round at a $50 billion valuation in anticipation of a potential Hong Kong initial public offering this year.