Moonshot Releases Kimi K3, a 2.8-Trillion-Parameter Open-Weight Model It Says Rivals US Frontier

Moonshot AI launched Kimi K3 on July 16, a mixture-of-experts model with roughly 2.8 trillion total parameters that routes each token through 16 of 896 experts, per the company's technical blog. The application programming interface (API) is live now, and full downloadable weights are slated for July 27, which if it holds would make K3 among the larger openly released models so far. Documentation seen by the AI ML Big Data channel lists a context window of up to 1 million tokens and a focus on coding, 3D and knowledge tasks.

On vendor-reported benchmarks, K3 scores 93.5% on GPQA Diamond and 88.3% on Terminal-Bench 2.1, with agentic results of 91.2% on BrowseComp and 84.2% on MCP Atlas. The AI Post channel places K3 ahead of Anthropic's Opus 4.8 and just below GPT-5.6 and Fable 5, which would narrow the historical gap between Chinese open-weight models and US closed systems.

Every figure here comes from Moonshot's own launch materials and has not been independently reproduced. The real test is whether third-party harnesses confirm the agentic and long-context scores once the weights ship, and whether serving a 2.8-trillion-parameter model at 1 million tokens of context is economical outside a well-provisioned cluster.