Kimi K3

Spec

Attribute	Value
Developer	Moonshot AI
Released	2026-07-16
Announced	2026-07-16
Context window	1M tokens
Pricing	$0.30/M cache-hit input · $3.00/M cache-miss input · $15.00/M output
License	Modified MIT (commercial use permitted; weights publicly downloadable)
Availability	Kimi Code, Kimi app, Kimi API; weights on Hugging Face (moonshot-ai/kimi-k3, released 2026-07-27)

Release Date

July 16, 2026.

Benchmarks

• Frontend Code Arena: beats Anthropic Fable 5 (human-preference Elo) — Moonshot's reported benchmark
• Positioned as strongest open-weight model at launch for agentic coding

Use Cases

• Long-horizon agentic coding (K3 Swarm Max variant)
• Chat and general assistant tasks (K3 Max variant)
• Parallel agent workloads (K3 Swarm Max)

Compared To

Model	Params	Context	Open?
Kimi K3	~2.8T MoE	1M	Yes (Modified MIT, released July 27)
Qwen 3.8 Max	~2.4T MoE	unknown	Planned
GLM-5.2	744B MoE	1M	Yes (MIT)
Claude Fable 5	unknown	200K	No
MiniMax M3	428B MoE	1M	Yes

Architecture

• Kimi Delta Attention (KDA): hybrid linear attention mechanism enabling efficient 1M-token processing
• Attention Residuals: enhances long-context coherence
• 896 experts; ~16 active per token (~1.8% activation ratio)
• Native visual understanding

Variants

• Kimi K3 Max — chat and agent tasks
• Kimi K3 Swarm Max — large-scale parallel agent processing

Sources

• Kimi API docs: quickstart
• Simon Willison analysis: kimi-k3
• Tom's Hardware: largest open-weight