Key Takeaways
China's Moonshot AI released Kimi K3 on July 16, a 2.8 trillion parameter model that is the largest open-weight AI system ever published, ahead of DeepSeek V4-Pro's 1.6 trillion.
Moonshot says its internal evaluations place K3 behind only the top two US frontier models, and blind Arena testing showed developers preferring it for front-end coding.
API pricing lands at $3 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens, with the full weights headed to Hugging Face in the coming days.
China's Moonshot AI released Kimi K3 on Thursday, and the number that matters is 2.8 trillion. That is the model's total parameter count, which makes K3 the largest open-weight AI system anyone has published, well ahead of the 1.6 trillion in DeepSeek V4-Pro, according to Axios. The model ships with a one million token context window, native visual understanding, and a new architecture Moonshot calls Attention Residuals.
The company claims its internal evaluations rank K3 behind only the two leading US frontier models. Company benchmarks always deserve skepticism, but the independent signal points the same direction. In blind testing on Arena, developers preferred K3 over every leading US system for front-end coding, and it tied the top American model in broader text rankings, VentureBeat reports.
The pricing is the quiet headline. Moonshot is charging $3 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens, mid-tier money for output the company says is near frontier grade, and TechCrunch notes the weights themselves land on Hugging Face within days. Anyone with the hardware can run it, tune it, and build on it for free.
The pattern here is hard to ignore. China is regulating consumer AI hard, shutting down AI companion agents for millions under a new law this week, while its labs push the open frontier as fast as it will move. Open weights at this scale reset the economics for every builder, including the teams wiring AI agents into payment rails. Worth watching when the weights actually drop.
People Also Ask
What is Kimi K3?
Kimi K3 is a 2.8 trillion parameter AI model released by China's Moonshot AI on July 16, 2026. It is the largest open-weight model ever published and includes a one million token context window and native visual understanding.
Is Kimi K3 open source?
Moonshot is releasing the full model weights on Hugging Face, which means anyone can download and run the model. The company still sells API access at $3 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens.
How does Kimi K3 compare to US models?
Moonshot's internal evaluations place K3 behind only the top two US frontier models. In independent blind testing on Arena, developers preferred it for front-end coding over leading US systems.
Who is Moonshot AI?
Moonshot AI is a Beijing-based AI lab founded in 2023 and known for its Kimi model family. It is one of the Chinese labs, alongside DeepSeek, pushing large open-weight models that compete with closed US systems.