Moonshot AI has introduced Kimi K3, a new flagship model that is already available through Kimi.com, Kimi Work, Kimi Code and the Kimi API, while the company says the full model weights will be released by July 27, 2026.
The launch is getting attention because Moonshot describes Kimi K3 as a 2.8-trillion-parameter, natively multimodal model with a 1-million-token context window. That combination puts the Beijing-based company back in the global race over whether open-weight models can approach the most capable closed systems from U.S. labs.
What changed
Kimi K3 is not just a chatbot update. Moonshot is pitching it as a long-horizon coding and knowledge-work model that can work across large codebases, images, documents and tool-driven workflows. The company says it uses Kimi Delta Attention and other architecture changes to make the model more efficient at very large scale.
The practical detail for developers is access. Moonshot says Kimi K3 is selectable now in its API, with listed pricing of $0.30 per million cached input tokens, $3.00 per million uncached input tokens and $15.00 per million output tokens. Full downloadable weights are not yet out, which means the strongest open-weight claim cannot be fully tested by outside developers until the release arrives.
Why it matters
If Kimi K3's public performance claims hold up, it could pressure closed AI providers on price, context length and developer control. A cheaper, high-context model can matter for coding agents, research workflows and companies that want more deployment flexibility than a fully hosted product gives them.
The caveat is that many of the launch comparisons still come from Moonshot's own evaluation setup. The company itself says Kimi K3 trails the strongest proprietary models overall and lists limitations, including sensitivity to preserved thinking history and a tendency toward excessive proactiveness in ambiguous tasks.
What to watch next
The next test is the promised July 27 weight release. Independent benchmark runs, real developer workloads, hosting requirements and safety reviews will matter more than launch-day charts. For now, Kimi K3 is a serious new entrant, but the open-model race will be judged by what outside users can reproduce.
