Kimi K3
Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 is a very large model that can read text, images and video, free to download for research and non-commercial use and aimed at long coding and knowledge-work tasks.
Key facts
- Released
- Jul 16, 2026
- What it does
- Text and chat: Writes, answers questions and holds a conversation.Thinks first: Can reason step by step before it answers: slower, but better at maths, code and tricky questions.Sees images: Understands pictures, screenshots and charts you share with it.Watches video: Understands video clips you share with it.
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- How
- Free to download, for non-commercial use only
- Size
- Parameters: The numbers a model learns during training: a rough measure of its size. Bigger usually means more capable, but slower and pricier to run. 7B means 7 billion.
- Announced as
- “Kimi K3”
From trckr's archive of releases before it started watching. Date and details from Epoch AI's database of AI models (CC BY 4.0).
Price and limits
What developers pay to use it through the API: How developers plug a model into their own apps and pay per use. A model that's "in the API" can be used by programmers, even if it isn't in a chat app yet., per million Tokens: The small chunks of text a model reads and writes, about three-quarters of a word each. Prices and limits are counted in tokens. sent (input) or written back (output), and how much it can take in at once.
- Input
- $3.00
- per million tokensCached: $0.30
- Output
- $15.00
- per million tokens
- Context window: How much a model can keep in mind at once: your question, any files you share and its own replies. Measured in tokens; 1,000 tokens is about 750 words.
- 1.05M tokens
- about 790,000 words
From the lab's own listing on models.dev and OpenRouter, checked .
How it scores
From independent testers, never the lab's own claims.
- Building apps, by people's votes#15 of 85
- Claude Opus 5.51,818
- 2Claude Sonnet 5.51,773
- 14DeepSeek V4.1 Flash1,664
- 15Kimi K31,657
- 16Muse Spark 1.31,654
Source: LMArena · LMArena WebDev
Compare Kimi K3 with
It came out 34 days after Kimi K2.7 Code, the lab's previous model.
The details
Kimi K3 is a Moonshot AI Mixture of experts (MoE): A design that splits a big model into many "expert" parts and uses only a few for each word. It gives big-model quality at closer to small-model speed. model with about 2,800 billion parameters: Data-centre scale: it runs on many chips (GPUs) at once. Parameters are the numbers a model learns: a rough measure of its size., around 104B active per Tokens: The small chunks of text a model reads and writes, about three-quarters of a word each. Prices and limits are counted in tokens., that handles text, images and video with a 1-million-token context. It is released as Open weights: The model's files are public, so anyone can download it, run it on their own computer and build on it, usually for free. trckr labels these "Open". under a non-commercial license.
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