Is Kimi K3 (Moonshot) Down?

KIMI K2.7 CODE IS BEING REMOVED FROM GITHUB COPILOT ON 2026-10-02 (announced 2026-09-03, vendor-primary -- GitHub, not Moonshot): GitHub listed **Kimi K2.7 Code** on a four-model deprecation slate to be removed '**across all GitHub Copilot experiences (including Copilot Chat, inline edits, ask and agent modes, and code completions) on October 2nd, 2026**', with **Kimi K3 named as the suggested alternative**. The others on the slate are Gemini 3.5 Flash, Gemini 3.6 Flash and Claude Opus 4.7. **SCOPE, BECAUSE THIS WILL BE MISREPORTED: this is a GitHub distribution decision, not a Moonshot retirement.** Nothing here says K2.7 Code is being discontinued by Moonshot, and Moonshot has published no corresponding notice; the model simply stops being selectable inside Copilot. Direct API and other surfaces are unaffected by this announcement. **THE PRACTICAL TRAP FOR COPILOT ORGS IS THE MIGRATION TARGET, NOT THE REMOVAL.** GitHub warns that '**Copilot Enterprise and Copilot Business administrators may need to enable access to the alternative models through their model policies**' -- and K3, being **open-weight**, is in the category GitHub excludes from default enablement, so it is one of the models most likely to be sitting off. **An org relying on K2.7 Code inside Copilot should verify the K3 policy is enabled before October 2, or it will lose the Kimi line entirely on that date rather than migrating to it.** This is the same open-weight exclusion this page has tracked since the 8/26 default-enablement rollout.

K3 BREAKS INTO WESTERN PRODUCT DISTRIBUTION IN A SINGLE WEEK -- GITHUB COPILOT AND PERPLEXITY (2026-08-04 and 2026-08-06, both vendor-primary): three weeks after launch, K3 stopped being an API-and-weights story and became a model you can select inside mainstream Western products. **GITHUB COPILOT (2026-08-06):** K3 is **generally available** in the Copilot model picker across **Pro, Pro+, Max, Business and Enterprise** -- including base Pro, a broader entitlement than Claude Opus 5 got on 7/24. GitHub's own assessment: it '**shows frontier-level abilities on agentic coding with highly cost-effective pricing**.' Crucially, **GitHub hosts K3 on Fireworks AI**, so requests do not go to Moonshot's API. Billed at provider list pricing under usage-based billing; available in VS Code, Visual Studio, Copilot CLI, the cloud agent, github.com, JetBrains, Xcode, Eclipse and GitHub Mobile. It is **off by default for Business and Enterprise** and needs an explicit admin policy, and GitHub pointedly tells admins to 'review open-weight models against their own security, compliance, and data-governance requirements before enabling them.' **PERPLEXITY (2026-08-04):** K3 is available in Perplexity and Perplexity Computer for **Pro and Max** subscribers, '**hosted exclusively on US-based servers**' -- Perplexity's pitch is explicitly '2.8T-parameter mixture-of-experts model with a 1M-token context window and native vision, **without data leaving US infrastructure**.' **WHY THIS MATTERS MORE THAN A NORMAL INTEGRATION:** the single biggest practical objection to Kimi in Western enterprises was jurisdictional, not technical. Both integrations answer it the same way -- re-host the open weights on US infrastructure and sell the model without the Chinese API. That is only possible *because* the weights are public, which makes this the clearest commercial payoff yet for Moonshot's open-weight strategy. It does not, however, resolve the licence question: the **Kimi K3 License** still governs the weights themselves, so re-hosting by a vendor is not the same as your own right to deploy them

OPEN WEIGHTS SHIPPED (~2026-07-26/27 -- Moonshot announced 7/27 and reporting puts the actual drop a day earlier, so treat the exact day as approximate): Moonshot published **Kimi K3's weights** to Hugging Face at `moonshotai/Kimi-K3`, resolving the open question this page carried since launch. The model card confirms **2.8T total parameters with 104B activated** (the ~50B active figure that circulated in aggregator coverage was wrong), a **1,048,576-token context window**, and safetensors in F32 / BF16 / U8. **License is the bespoke 'Kimi K3 License', NOT the Modified MIT that covers K2.6 and K2.7-Code** -- the card states 'Both the code repository and the model weights are released under the Kimi K3 License', so anyone planning commercial use or a derivative needs to read those terms rather than assuming K2 permissions carry over. Practical effect: K3 becomes the largest open-weight model actually downloadable, though at 2.8T params it is a datacenter-class deployment, not a local one

MODEL LAUNCH -- KIMI K3 (2026-07-16/17): Moonshot shipped **Kimi K3**, billed as the largest open-weight model ever announced -- **2.8T total parameters**, multimodal reasoning, **1M token context**, live immediately on kimi.com, the Kimi app, the Moonshot API, and OpenRouter at **$3/M input, $15/M output** (vs Fable 5's $50/M output). Unveiled at the World AI Conference in Shanghai 7/17 after appearing on platforms 7/16; the stealth Arena model 'Kivine' was K3 in testing, and Arena.AI ranked it the best available model at launch. Vendor claims it performs competitively with Claude Fable 5 and 'substantially outperforms' Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.6 Sol -- third-party verification pending; treat vendor benchmark claims accordingly. Market reaction was dubbed a 'second DeepSeek shock': TSMC fell 7%, SoftBank 9%, Nasdaq 100 ~1% on 7/17. CAVEATS (updated 2026-07-29 -- (a) and (d) are now RESOLVED, see the weights-release entry above): (a) weights shipped ~2026-07-26/27; (b) API capacity is limited at launch -- OpenRouter flags frequent 429 errors; (c) reasoning effort currently supports only 'max'; (d) the aggregator-reported ~50B active-parameter figure was WRONG -- the model card publishes **104B activated**

MODEL LAUNCH (2026-06-12): **Kimi K2.7-Code** -- Moonshot's code-specialized variant dropped on HuggingFace (moonshotai/Kimi-K2.7-Code, HN front page 333 points). Specs: 1T-param MoE with 32B active (384 experts), 256K context, Modified MIT license, MoonViT 400M vision encoder, built on K2.6, ~30% fewer thinking tokens than K2.6, forces thinking mode on. API via platform.moonshot.ai (OpenAI- and Anthropic-compatible endpoints). Notably honest self-published benchmarks show it TRAILING the frontier: Kimi Code Bench v2 62.0 vs GPT-5.5's 69.0 and Opus 4.8's 67.4 -- Moonshot is positioning on open-weights value, not SOTA claims. API pricing circulating in aggregators (~$0.19 cached/$0.95 in/$4.00 out per 1M) -- verify on the vendor pricing page before relying on it

API DEPRECATION (2026-05-25, vendor docs verbatim: 'The kimi-k2 series models were officially discontinued on May 25, 2026'): retired model ids -- kimi-k2-0905-preview, kimi-k2-0711-preview, kimi-k2-turbo-preview, kimi-k2-thinking, kimi-k2-thinking-turbo. If your code pins any of these, requests now fail; migrate to kimi-k2.6 (or kimi-k2.5, which remains an active model alongside it). K2.6 detail confirmed on the vendor blog: open weights on HuggingFace (moonshotai/Kimi-K2.6), 256K context (262,144 default), agent swarm scaling to **300 sub-agents / 4,000 coordinated steps** (up from K2.5's 100/1,500)