Releases7/27/2026 · VentureBeat Moonshot AI ships Kimi K3, the largest open-weight model ever
Moonshot AI released Kimi K3 on July 16, 2026, open-sourcing the 2.8-trillion-parameter weights under a modified MIT license eleven days later. The mixture-of-experts model activates 104B parameters (16 of 896 experts) per token, adds a 1M-token context window and native image/video understanding, and topped Arena's blind Frontend Code evaluation ahead of Claude Fable 5 — the clearest sign yet that open-weight labs out of China are setting the pace at the very top of the frontier race, not just chasing it.
K3 succeeds the original Kimi K2 through the K2 Thinking, K2.5, K2.6 and K2.7-Code line, and developers have already wired it into Cursor and Vercel, running it on consumer GPUs within days of release.
Kimi K3 →