K
Kimi K3
Moonshot AI · Released Jul 2026
Conditional
Strong model now under active White House investigation for industrial-scale IP theft. US Treasury threatens sanctions — legal and operational risk is material. Technical benchmarks unchanged.
Is it right for you?
Good for
- Front-end and 3D work with image feedback — Arena WebDev #1 (1679, preliminary)
- Long-horizon autonomous coding — MiniTriton compiler, 48-hour chip design demonstrations
- Multi-agent orchestration — K3 Swarm Max variant for large-scale parallel processing
- Large-context knowledge work — 1M window for whole-repo and multi-document research
Not good for
- Precise-execution tasks — still trails Fable 5 and GPT 5.6 Sol
- Self-hosted deployment — requires 64+ accelerators, weights not yet downloadable
- Cost-sensitive workloads — AA measured high output verbosity driving up task costs
Pricing
Input
$3.00 / 1M
Output
$15.00 / 1M
Context
1M ctx, $0.30 cached. Weights live (Jul 27).
Benchmarks
Verdict history
Jul 23, 2026
conditional -> conditional (rationale updated) — On July 22, 2026, White House OSTP Director Michael Kratsios publicly accused Moonshot AI of industrial-scale distillation of Anthropic's Fable 5 to train Kimi K3. Treasury Secretary Bessent threatened sanctions and Entity List designations.
Sources
- Graphify: Architectural deep-diveJul 2026
- Artificial Analysis: Kimi K3Jul 2026
- MarkTechPost: Moonshot releases K3Jul 2026
- VentureBeat: Largest open-source model everJul 2026
- Arena WebDev LeaderboardJul 2026
- Moonshot AI: Kimi K3 — Open Frontier IntelligenceJul 2026
Verification log
- Pricing— No changes
Automated agent
- Pricing— Updated
Automated agent
Kimi K3 open weights went live on Hugging Face Jul 26 evening EDT (one day ahead of Jul 27 schedule). Model is now truly open-weight under Modified MIT license. Pricing unchanged at $3/$15. This is a material status change from "weights not yet downloadable" to "weights live on Hugging Face".
- Pricing— No changes
Automated agent