Moonshot AI

Overview

Beijing-based AI startup, creators of the Kimi assistant and model family. Known for pushing long-context capabilities and massive open-weight scale. Released the world's first open 3T-class AI system (Kimi K3, July 2026). Competes in the Chinese open-weight tier alongside Z.ai, MiniMax, and Alibaba / Qwen AI Lab.

Key People

• Founder: Yang Zhilin (CEO)

Models & Products

• Kimi K3 — July 2026, 2.8T MoE, 1M context, world's largest open-weight model at launch; weights released July 27 (Modified MIT, Hugging Face: moonshot-ai/kimi-k3)

Recent Activity

• 2026-07-27: Kimi K3 open weights released — largest open-weight model ever, Modified MIT — Moonshot AI released the full weights for Kimi K3 as promised at launch. License: Modified MIT (commercial use permitted). Hosted on Hugging Face (moonshot-ai/kimi-k3). Precision: MXFP4 (~1.4 TB fast memory required for full inference). Self-hosted inference does not route traffic to Moonshot servers — the primary benefit cited by US/EU enterprise users concerned about Chinese API routing. K3 Max and K3 Swarm Max API variants remain available via Kimi Code and Kimi API. With this release, Kimi K3 becomes the largest open-weight model ever publicly released (2.8T parameter MoE). (source) (HuggingFace)

• 2026-07-16: Kimi K3 launched on Kimi Code and Kimi app; K3 Max and K3 Swarm Max variants; open-weight release by July 27 (source)

Strategic Position

Moonshot is the scale outlier in Chinese open-weight: Kimi K3 at 2.8T is the largest model released open-weight by any Chinese lab, and beats Anthropic Fable 5 on at least one benchmark (Frontend Code Arena). The long-context expertise (Kimi's original differentiator) is baked into K3's 1M-token window. Competing against Alibaba Qwen 3.8 (2.4T, announced July 19) and GLM-5.2 (Z.ai).

Related

• Kimi K3
• Z.ai
• Alibaba / Qwen AI Lab
• MiniMax
• Reasoning Models