Kimi K3: Moonshot's 3T-Class AI Model Shakes Up Industry

Chinese AI firm Moonshot released its Kimi K3 model on July 16, sparking discussions about U.S. competition. This model boasts 2.8 trillion parameters and a 1 million-token context window, making it the "world's first open 3T-class model." What's interesting is its size compared to Google’s Gemma 4, which has 30.7 billion parameters. Moonshot openly stated Kimi K3 still trails Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5 and OpenAI’s GPT 5.6 Sol in overall performance. However, Kimi K3 showed frontier-level performance in its own evaluations. On July 27, Moonshot released the model weights, allowing users to modify and run Kimi K3 under a flexible license. Kimi K3 also costs about a third of Anthropic’s Fable model in terms of input and output token prices. The bottom line: This development is influencing the debate around open-weight models and the future of AI innovation.