Moonshot AI
Kimi K3 is Moonshot AI's 2.8-trillion-parameter Mixture-of-Experts flagship built on Kimi Delta Attention and Attention Residuals, with native vision and a 1M-token context window. It effectively activates 16 of 896 experts and targets long-horizon coding, agentic knowledge work and reasoning. K3 is available in Kimi, Kimi Work, Kimi Code and the Kimi API as kimi-k3. The launch API price is $0.30 per million cache-hit input tokens, $3 per million cache-miss input tokens and $15 per million output tokens. Moonshot released the full Kimi K3 weights, model code and custom license on Hugging Face on July 27, 2026; the repository contains 96 weight shards and an MXFP4-compressed checkpoint. The official limitations still warn that harnesses which fail to preserve K3's full thinking history can produce unstable quality, and recommend a verified-compatible harness such as Kimi Code.
Editorial verdict
Teams evaluating a frontier-scale Chinese model for repository-scale coding, multimodal technical work, agentic research and long-context knowledge workflows.
Avoid it when you lack the infrastructure for a 2.8T model, need a low-cost short-context model, or use a harness that cannot reliably retain full reasoning history.
Kimi K3 merits a separate LLM & API profile because it is a flagship model with its own architecture, context length, hosted pricing and public open-weight release, rather than a minor K2.7 Code revision.
$0.30/M cache-hit input, $3/M cache-miss input and $15/M output tokens
Kimi API pay-as-you-go billing, Kimi membership, Kimi Work subscription, Enterprise sales
Commercial use should follow the current product, API, model license and billing terms.
Review prompt, file, media upload, retention and training-use terms before sensitive workloads.
Use Kimi Code or a verified-compatible harness for repository navigation, terminal-tool orchestration and extended engineering sessions.
Apply native vision to screenshot-driven frontend, game, CAD and visual-debugging workflows alongside code generation.
Evaluate K3 in Kimi Work or the API for deep research, interactive reports, dashboards and multi-step analysis.
Hosted access and API pricing were rechecked on August 4, 2026, and the July 27 open-weight release is now linked. Recheck thinking-effort controls, capacity and license suitability before production deployment.
kimi-k2-7-code
minimax-m3
zhipu-glm
qwen
deepseek
official · en · verified 2026-08-04
Confirms K3 architecture, 2.8T parameters, 1M context, native vision, hosted availability, model ID, pricing, benchmark disclosures and limitations.
repository · en · verified 2026-08-04
Confirms the public July 27 weight release, custom Kimi K3 license, model code, MXFP4 checkpoint and 96 weight shards.
docs · en · verified 2026-07-17
Official platform entry linked from the K3 availability section for API access.
official · en · verified 2026-07-17
Official Kimi Code surface linked as a K3 access path and recommended-compatible harness.
Last checked: 2026-08-04