Morning Edition · Sunday, October 25, 2026Published at 2:22 AM EDT · New York
The 2.8-trillion-parameter mixture-of-experts model scores 65.7% against Opus 5.5's 66.4% and GPT-6 Astra's 58.2%. A separate harness study shows orchestration alone can raise a 27-billion-parameter open model above a closed frontier model on hard coding problems.

Moonshot AI released Kimi K3.1 Pro on October 23. It is a mixture-of-experts model with 2.8 trillion total parameters, 104 billion active parameters and a 1-million-token context window. The Beijing lab says it will publish the weights by November 4 (Trending Topics). The Russian-language channel AI ML Big Data reported that the model beats OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra on programming tests and is built for software development, agents and 3D modeling.
On agentic coding, the model performs close to the level of closed frontier models. On Terminal-Bench 4.0, K3.1 Pro scored 65.7%, against 58.2% for GPT-6 Astra and 66.4% for Claude Opus 5.5, The Next Web reported. Moonshot also reports 51.7 on SWE-Marathon v1.1 and 75.5 on DeepSWE v1.1. Artificial Analysis ranks the model fourth on its Intelligence Index with 55 points. By its calculation, the gap between the best open model and the best proprietary model would narrow from 12 points to 3 once the weights ship (Trending Topics).
Most of these figures come from the vendor, and no third party can run the model under its own harness until the weights are public. The knowledge-work comparison shows how much the harness and the benchmark version affect results. The leaderboard Moonshot cites puts K3.1 Pro at 1,846 Elo on GDPval-AA, behind Opus 5.5 at 1,866 and Meta's Muse Wonder Full at 1,857. Anthropic's own launch page for Opus 5.5 listed 1,846 on GDPval-AA v2.1 (VentureBeat). Anthropic released Opus 5.5 on September 22 and says it costs about 40% less to run than Opus 5 on typical workloads (MindStudio).
Moonshot disclosed one safety trade-off. Before the open release, the lab removed cyber-related data from midtraining and from the RL mix, giving up some vulnerability-research capability (The Next Web). K3.1 Pro builds on Kimi K3. Moonshot open-sourced K3's weights, its technical report and its training infrastructure on July 27 (Beijing Daily). Hong Kong media have reported that Moonshot plans to list in the city within the year (Sing Tao).
A separate result that reached Hacker News this week shows that orchestration can move coding scores as much as a new checkpoint. The GVS5H repository and its arXiv preprint describe a training-free method. Fresh instances of one model split a problem and coordinate through a shared filesystem that holds a plan, notes and the current solution. On the 100 most recent hard LiveCodeBench problems, a locally served Qwen3.8-27B rose from 66.8% to 92.4% pass@1, compared with 90.4% for Anthropic's Claude Fable 5. The authors report gains of up to 25.6 percentage points across eleven models, and they also report that some models showed no gain or got worse (TechBytes).
Part of a tracked trend
Open-Weight Models Close the Gap With Closed Frontier Labs
Over the next 3-9 months, open-weight releases with downloadable weights, long context, and strong agentic/coding performance increasingly match closed frontier models on practical work, eroding the closed-lab moat.
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If the framing holds, Moonshot gains before its reported Hong Kong listing, and inference hosts and enterprise buyers gain a cheap alternative that cuts into the per-token prices Anthropic and OpenAI need to support their valuations.
Moonshot's own charts are the source of the 65.7% Terminal-Bench 4.0 score and the claim that the model beats GPT-6 Astra, while the independent Artificial Analysis index puts K3.1 Pro at 55 against 58 for Opus 5.5, and on Terminal-Bench Science it scores 38.1 against 63.3 for Opus 5.5 and 68.1 for GPT-6 Astra, so "within a point" holds for one vendor-run test and not across the board.
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What this means
The mechanism is price and substitution. A downloadable model within one point of Opus 5.5 on an agentic coding benchmark lets inference hosts and enterprises run near-frontier coding work at the cost of their own hardware. That puts pressure on Anthropic's and OpenAI's per-token prices at the moment Anthropic is preparing a public listing priced on revenue growth. US controls on access to models do not reach weights posted from China, so governments and companies outside the US get a credible coding model regardless of US export policy. That supports the desk's thesis of two AI superpowers. The consensus treats each Chinese open release as a capability event. The GVS5H data suggests the harness now accounts for a large share of measured coding performance, which makes leaderboard gaps less reliable in both directions. The nearest precedent is DeepSeek-R1 in January 2025: Nvidia lost about 17% in one session, and OpenAI released the cheaper o3-mini within a week. The desk's read is that US inference providers will likely host K3.1 Pro within weeks of the weights appearing, and at least one closed lab will cut the price of its coding tier before year-end. This depends on Moonshot releasing the full weights under a license that allows commercial hosting. Independent Terminal-Bench 4.0 runs that land well below 65.7% would prove this read wrong.
What to watch
Observations to monitor, not financial advice.
Synthesized from: Polylog editors · Anthropic News · Hacker News
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