Kimi K3 (Moonshot)
A Tier · 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
Score Breakdown
Benchmark Scores
Benchmarks for Kimi K3 (2.8T, launched 2026-07-16) -- Arena.AI ranked it best-available at launch; vendor claims parity with Fable 5, third-party suites pending. Scores below are K2.6/K2.5-era baselines retained until K3 third-party runs publish
| Benchmark | Description | Score | |
|---|---|---|---|
| SWE-Bench Pro | 58.6% | ||
| MMLU-Pro (K2.5 baseline) | 84.8% | ||
| GPQA Diamond (K2.5 baseline) | 80.5% | ||
| AIME 2025 (K2.5 baseline) | 91.2% | ||
| LiveCodeBench (K2.5 baseline) | 74.1% |
Last updated: 2026-04-27
Personality & Tone
The long-context note-taker
Tone: Careful and document-focused. Kimi K2.5 shines when you dump a long document in -- replies read as summary-and-citation rather than open chat, leaning on the source material rather than the model's opinions.
Quirks: Context handling is the whole pitch. Without a document to anchor to, replies feel plainer than Qwen or DeepSeek. Native Chinese quality is very strong; English is decent but not class-leading.
The Good and the Bad
What we like
- +Frontier-tier performance -- Elo 1309 on GDPval-AA, behind only OpenAI and Anthropic flagships
- +Beats Claude Opus 4.5 on several coding benchmarks per community testing
- +Unified thinking + non-thinking modes in one model (no need to swap)
- +256K context window handles large codebases for agentic coding
- +Weights are genuinely downloadable -- K2.6/K2.7-Code under Modified MIT, and K3 under its own Kimi K3 License (check its terms before commercial use)
- +Native tool-use and agentic planning trained in -- not bolted on
What could be better
- −Self-hosting is datacenter-only -- K3 is 2.8T params (104B activated) and even the older K2 line needs 4+ H100-class GPUs
- −Moonshot is a smaller lab than DeepSeek/Alibaba -- less Western infrastructure support
- −API pricing ($0.60 in / $3.00 out) is higher than DeepSeek V3.2 ($0.28 in / $0.42 out)
- −PRC content filters apply (Tiananmen, Taiwan, etc.)
- −Documentation is heavily Chinese-first -- English docs trail releases
Pricing
API (Kimi K3)
- ✓K3 (launched 2026-07-16): 2.8T-param open-weight multimodal reasoning model
- ✓1M token context window
- ✓Reasoning effort currently supports only 'max'
- ✓Live on kimi.com, Kimi app, Moonshot API, and OpenRouter; capacity-limited at launch (frequent 429s)
Self-hosted (Free -- K2.6/K2.7 line)
- ✓K3 WEIGHTS PUBLISHED ~2026-07-26/27 at huggingface.co/moonshotai/Kimi-K3 -- safetensors, 2.8T total params, 104B activated, 1,048,576-token context
- ✓K3 ships under its own **Kimi K3 License**, NOT the Modified MIT used for K2 -- read the license terms before commercial use
- ✓K2.6 + K2.7-Code weights remain on Hugging Face under Modified MIT
- ✓Fine-tuning permitted
API (Moonshot direct, K2.6)
- ✓K2.6: $0.60 in / $2.50 out (Moonshot direct)
- ✓256K context
- ✓Native video input (mp4/mov/avi/webm)
System Requirements
Hardware needed to self-host. Min = smallest viable setup (usually heavy quantization). Max = full-precision / production-grade.
| Model variant | Min | Max |
|---|---|---|
| Kimi K2.5 (1T total, 32B active MoE)Practically a hosted-only model for most users -- self-hosting requires enterprise hardware | 256 GB unified RAM Mac Studio M3 Ultra (Q2, ~3 tok/s) | 8× H200 141 GB FP8 or 16× H100 (production-grade) |
Known Issues
- 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 themSource: 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) · 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 oneSource: Hugging Face model card (huggingface.co/moonshotai/Kimi-K3, fetched 2026-07-29) · 2026-07-27
- 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**Source: OpenRouter (openrouter.ai/moonshotai/kimi-k3), Fortune (2026-07-17), Reuters, CNBC, r/LocalLLaMA · 2026-07-17
- 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 itSource: HuggingFace (huggingface.co/moonshotai/Kimi-K2.7-Code), Hacker News, platform.moonshot.ai · 2026-06-12
- 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)Source: Moonshot platform docs (platform.kimi.ai/docs/models), kimi.com/blog/kimi-k2-6, HuggingFace moonshotai/Kimi-K2.6 · 2026-05-25
- SUPERSEDED (2026-07-16): the June-era 'K3 never shipped / treat K3 claims as fabrication' guidance no longer holds -- Kimi K3 is real and launched July 16-17, 2026 (see the K3 launch entry above). The May Manifold window did resolve NO (K3 missed May by six weeks), and the skepticism was correct at the time; the launch simply came later than the rumor mill claimed. Retained for history: the K2-series API deprecation (5/25) and K2.6 investment preceded K3 rather than replacing it.Source: kimi.com, OpenRouter (openrouter.ai/moonshotai/kimi-k3), Fortune (2026-07-17) · 2026-07-16
- Kimi K2.6 (GA 2026-04-20) supersedes K2.5 -- 1T total / 32B active MoE, 256K context, adds native video input (mp4/mov/avi/webm). Scores 54 on Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v4.0, ranked #1 open-weights and #4 overall (three points behind Claude Opus 4.7 / Gemini 3.1 Pro / OpenAI flagships at 57). SWE-Bench Pro 58.6%. Modified MIT license unchanged. Moonshot direct API: $0.60 in / $2.50 out per 1M tokens. OpenRouter blended: ~$0.95 in / $4.00 out. If you were on K2.5, the upgrade is non-breaking on the API side -- Moonshot routes the K2.6 model under the same endpoint familySource: Moonshot Kimi blog (kimi.com/blog/kimi-k2-6), HuggingFace moonshotai/Kimi-K2.6, Artificial Analysis, OpenRouter, SiliconANGLE · 2026-04-20
- Self-hosting K2.5 / K2.6 at usable speed requires $30K+ in enterprise GPU hardware (8x H200 FP8 or 16x H100 production-grade) -- realistically this is a hosted-API model. Mac Studio M3 Ultra 256 GB unified RAM at Q2 quantization runs the model but at ~3 tok/sSource: Reddit r/LocalLLaMA, llm-stats.com · 2026-03
- Early K2.5 releases had inconsistent tool-calling when quantized below Q4 -- community fixes landed March 2026; K2.6 inherits the same tool-use stack so quant guidance carries forwardSource: Hugging Face discussions · 2026-03
Best for
Agentic coding workflows, tool-use agents, long-horizon repository work (1M context), and teams who want frontier-tier quality at a fraction of frontier pricing ($15/M output vs Fable 5's $50/M).
Not for
Solo developers or hobbyists who want to run models locally -- the K3 weights are public now, but 2.8T parameters is datacenter territory, far beyond consumer hardware. Use Qwen3-Coder-Next or DeepSeek for self-hosting today.
Our Verdict
Kimi K3 (July 16-17, 2026) vaulted Moonshot from 'best open-weights value' to genuine frontier contention: 2.8T parameters, 1M context, multimodal, ranked best-available on Arena.AI at launch, and priced at $3/$15 per 1M -- a fifth of Anthropic's Fable 5 output rate. The launch rattled markets enough to be called a second DeepSeek shock. The open-weight promise has since been kept: the weights landed on Hugging Face around July 26-27 at 2.8T total / 104B activated, though under a bespoke Kimi K3 License rather than the Modified MIT of the K2 line, so read the terms before commercial use. Early August settled the distribution question too -- K3 is now selectable inside GitHub Copilot (hosted on Fireworks AI) and Perplexity (US-hosted), which lets Western teams use it without touching Moonshot's API. Remaining caveats: vendor benchmark claims still await third-party verification, the Moonshot API is visibly capacity-strained, and at 2.8T parameters self-hosting is datacenter work, not a laptop project. If you want maximum capability per dollar, K3 is the first model to test -- via Copilot or Perplexity if jurisdiction is a concern, via the Moonshot API if it isn't.
Sources
- GitHub changelog: Kimi K3 is now available in GitHub Copilot (2026-08-06) (accessed 2026-08-06)
- Perplexity changelog: Shared workspaces, Personal Computer for Windows, and Model Council -- includes US-hosted Kimi K3 (2026-08-04) (accessed 2026-08-06)
- Hugging Face: moonshotai/Kimi-K3 model card (weights published 2026-07-27; 2.8T total / 104B activated; Kimi K3 License) (accessed 2026-07-29)
- OpenRouter: Kimi K3 (pricing, context, capacity notes) (accessed 2026-07-18)
- Fortune: Moonshot Kimi K3 rattles markets (2026-07-17) (accessed 2026-07-18)
- Moonshot Kimi K2.6 blog (GA 2026-04-20) (accessed 2026-04-27)
- HuggingFace moonshotai/Kimi-K2.6 (accessed 2026-04-27)
- Artificial Analysis: Kimi K2.6 leading open weights (accessed 2026-04-27)
- SiliconANGLE: Kimi K2.6 release (accessed 2026-04-27)
- OpenRouter Kimi K2.6 pricing (accessed 2026-04-27)
- llm-stats.com (accessed 2026-04-13)
- Reddit r/singularity, r/LocalLLaMA (accessed 2026-04-13)
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