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Kimi K3 is Moonshot AI's flagship model, announced July 17, 2026: a 2.8-trillion-parameter mixture-of-experts Transformer that the company describes as the world's first open 3T-class model, with weights stated for release within ten days of launch. Contemporaneous coverage framed it as the largest open-weight release to date and the closing move of a month in which Chinese AI labs pushed open models to unprecedented scale.12

Architecture and training

K3's release materials describe a substantially new stack rather than a scaled K2: Kimi Delta Attention (KDA) with Attention Residuals (AttnRes) in place of conventional attention, a routing design the company calls Stable LatentMoE activating 16 of 896 experts per token, and low-precision training with MXFP4 weights and MXFP8 activations. Moonshot reports roughly 2.5 times the overall scaling efficiency of Kimi K2, continuing the efficiency-disclosure norm its K2 technical report helped establish;3 the model carries native vision and a million-token context window.1

Capabilities and pricing

Per the developer's launch benchmarks, K3 leads the open field broadly while ranking below Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 and OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol tier overall, an unusually direct concession that also frames how narrow the closed-frontier gap had become. API pricing launched at $0.30 per million input tokens on cache hits ($3.00 on misses) and $15.00 per million output tokens, with reported cache-hit rates above 90% in coding workloads, aggressive economics in the pattern that made the Kimi line's pricing a market story through 2025-2026.1

Context

K3 arrived days after Meituan's LongCat-2.0 and DeepSeek's V4 preview, capping the trillion-parameter open wave documented at Chinese AI labs; its scale claims and the ten-day gap between product launch and weights release both drew scrutiny in coverage, and this article records launch figures as developer-reported pending independent evaluation, per this wiki's epistemic rules.2

See also

References

  1. Moonshot AI, "Kimi K3" release page, kimi.com/en/blog/kimi-k3, July 17, 2026 (fetch-verified). ↩↩↩

  2. Reuters via Yahoo Finance, "China's Moonshot unveils world's largest open AI model, closing in on US rivals," July 17, 2026. ↩↩

  3. Kimi Team, "Kimi K2: Open Agentic Intelligence," arXiv:2507.20534, July 2025. ↩