Is Kimi K3 (Moonshot) Down?

Quickest ways to check the current status of moonshot.cn plus recent known issues and working alternatives if it's out.

Last editorial review: 2026-10-02

How to check right now

Known issues we've tracked

OPENAI ATTRIBUTES A MODEL-DISTILLATION CAMPAIGN TO 'INDIVIDUALS ASSOCIATED WITH MOONSHOT AI', AND KIMI K2.7 CODE LEFT GITHUB COPILOT ON SCHEDULE (2026-09-30 and 2026-10-02; both vendor-primary, neither from Moonshot): **(1) The OpenAI claim (9/30):** OpenAI says it 'identified and disrupted a coordinated campaign designed to extract protected reasoning from our models', consistent with 'adversarial distillation'. Its attribution, quoted in full: **'It is unclear whether all operators we observed during the relevant time period originated from a single actor. However, we attribute a core cluster of the activity to individuals associated with Moonshot AI, the developer of Kimi.'** OpenAI's account of the mechanics: no encryption broken and no database or stored conversations accessed; operators 'manipulated model interactions so that protected reasoning could be reproduced in forms visible to the requester', including copying encrypted reasoning from one conversation into another and asking the model to decrypt and transcribe it; activity from July 1, spikes on July 24-25 (16,000 requests from 4,000+ users), a related cluster of more than 15,000 users disrupted by July 28. **This page records OpenAI's attribution as OpenAI's attribution.** No Moonshot statement was located on this sweep, OpenAI publishes no evidence linking the accounts to Moonshot, and the post does not claim any Kimi model was trained on the extracted reasoning. Readers evaluating Kimi K3 for regulated or enterprise use should expect this to come up in procurement and should watch for a Moonshot response. **(2) Copilot removal executed (10/02):** GitHub confirmed 'As of today, October 2, 2026, we have deprecated' **Kimi K2.7 Code** 'across all GitHub Copilot experiences', suggested alternative **Kimi K3** -- the 9/03 notice recorded below executed on its date. K3 stays in the Copilot picker (Fireworks-hosted) and in Perplexity.
2026-10-02•OpenAI (openai.com/index/disrupting-a-coordinated-model-distillation-campaign/, publicationDateText 'September 30, 2026') + GitHub Changelog (github.blog/changelog/2026-10-02-selected-models-in-github-copilot-deprecated/) -- both fetched 2026-10-02 via curl with browser UA; no Moonshot response located
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.
2026-09-03•GitHub Changelog (github.blog/changelog/2026-09-03-upcoming-deprecation-of-selected-github-copilot-models/) -- fetched 2026-09-05
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
2026-08-06•GitHub changelog (github.blog/changelog/2026-08-06-kimi-k3-is-now-available-in-github-copilot/, fetched 2026-08-06), Perplexity changelog (perplexity.ai/changelog/shared-workspaces-personal-computer-for-windows-and-model-council, dated 08/04/26, fetched 2026-08-06)
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
2026-07-27•Hugging Face model card (huggingface.co/moonshotai/Kimi-K3, fetched 2026-07-29)
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**
2026-07-17•OpenRouter (openrouter.ai/moonshotai/kimi-k3), Fortune (2026-07-17), Reuters, CNBC, r/LocalLLaMA
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
2026-06-12•HuggingFace (huggingface.co/moonshotai/Kimi-K2.7-Code), Hacker News, platform.moonshot.ai

Issues here are sourced from our editorial sweeps, not real-time telemetry. Newer issues may exist.

What to use if Kimi K3 (Moonshot) is down

Top AIToolTier-ranked alternatives in the same category, ordered by our overall score.

A

Qwen (Alibaba)

8.8

**Qwen-Image-2.1 went open-weight (weights 2026-09-14, blog 2026-09-20)** -- a unified text-to-image and editing model with a 7B visual-generation component, native transparent (RGBA) output, up to 10 reference images and mask-guided local edits -- but under a **research-only licence, not Apache**: commercial use needs a separate licence from Alibaba. Alibaba's open-weights + API family, and August 2026 was its biggest open-release month yet: **Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B -- the Max-class flagship -- went open-weight on 2026-08-08** (custom Qwen3.8-Max licence), **Qwen3.8-27B** dense landed Apache 2.0 (8/05), and **Qwen3.8-Flash-Next** (8/24 weights, 8/26 blog) previews the Qwen4 architecture: 125B main + 51B n-gram embeddings with only 6B active, served as Qwen3.8-Flash at $0.15/$0.47 per 1M. Qwen 3.7 Max remains the GA API flagship ($2.50/$7.50)

A

MiniMax M3

8.4

**MiniMax-H3's weights are public on Hugging Face (repo 2026-07-28, updated 2026-08-13) under a community licence whose open-weight grant is limited to the US, EU, UK and South Korea**, and **MiniMax Music 3 (2026-08-07)** ships open weights for five-minute full-song generation with a prominent-attribution commercial clause. MiniMax's coding/agent flagship -- M3 (June 1 2026): 1M-token context, MSA sparse attention (>15x decoding speedup at long context), SWE-Bench Pro 59.0%, Terminal-Bench 66.0%. OPEN WEIGHTS LIVE on HuggingFace since June 12 (~428B total / ~23B active, native multimodal, minimax-community license)

A

Gemma 4 (Google)

8.3

Google DeepMind's open-weights model family -- multimodal, 256K context, runs on edge devices **EmbeddingGemma 2 (announced 2026-10-06; weights on Hugging Face since 9/14) adds a 740M-parameter Apache 2.0 embedding model built on Gemma 4 that maps text, code, images, video and audio into one 768-dimensional space, with an 8K context, Matryoshka truncation down to 128 dimensions and about 191 MB of RAM for text-only use on a Pixel 11 Pro.**

A

IBM Granite 4.0

8.2

IBM's enterprise-focused open-weight family -- Granite 4.0 hybrid Mamba-2 + transformer architecture (70-80% memory reduction vs pure transformer), 3B to 32B sizes, Apache 2.0. First open model family to secure ISO 42001 certification. Nano 350M runs on CPU with 8-16GB RAM. 3B Vision variant landed 2026-04-01

A

gpt-oss (OpenAI)

8.1

OpenAI's FIRST open-weight models -- gpt-oss-120b (single 80GB GPU, near parity with o4-mini on reasoning) and gpt-oss-20b (runs on 16GB edge devices). Apache 2.0. Launched 2025-08-05. gpt-oss-safeguard ships in 2026 as the safety-tuned variant

About Kimi K3 (Moonshot)

Tier A (8.1/10). Moonshot's 2.8T-parameter Kimi K3 (launched 2026-07-16/17) is the largest open-weight model ever released -- 1M context, multimodal, $3/$15 per 1M via API, ranked best-available on Arena.AI at launch. WEIGHTS SHIPPED ~2026-07-26/27 on Hugging Face (2.8T total / 104B activated, safetensors) under a custom Kimi K3 License, not the Modified MIT of the K2 line