Kimi K3 Release Date: Released July 16, 2026
Kimi K3 Release Date: Released July 16, 2026
The wait is over. Moonshot AI officially released Kimi K3 on July 16, 2026, ending months of speculation about the Moonshot AI K3 model release date. The model is live now via kimi.ai and the Kimi API.
What Launched
Kimi K3 is Moonshot AI's new flagship — and a major architectural step beyond K2:
- 2.8 trillion total parameters in a sparse Mixture-of-Experts design — 896 experts, 16 activated per token
- KDA (Kimi Delta Attention) — a hybrid linear-attention mechanism with attention residuals, built to make million-token contexts practical
- Up to 1M token context window (tier-dependent, see below)
- Native vision understanding
- Max thinking effort at launch (
reasoning_effort: max);lowandhightiers roll out later
Moonshot positions K3 as its strongest model for coding, game/3D, and knowledge tasks — with coding scores reported to surpass Claude Fable 5.
Availability and Tiers
K3 is gated by membership tier:
| Tier | K3 access | Context window |
|---|---|---|
| Andante | Not available | — |
| Moderato | Yes | 256K |
| Allegretto and above | Yes | 1M |
Developers calling the API use the model ID k3. For third-party tools, set the context-window field to 1048576 to unlock the full window. Exceeding your plan's limits returns a 401.
The stable coding model kimi-for-coding (Kimi K2.7 Code) remains available to all members, with a kimi-for-coding-highspeed variant (6× speed, 3× consumption) for Allegretto and above.
Open Weights: July 27, 2026
Moonshot has committed to releasing the full model weights by July 27, 2026 under a Modified MIT license. At 2.8T parameters, K3 will be the first openly available model in the 3-trillion-parameter class — a significant moment for the open-weight ecosystem.
What This Means
The Kimi K3 release date 2026 question is settled, but the rollout continues: additional thinking-effort tiers are coming, and the open-weight release will let researchers and self-hosters run the largest open model ever published. For pricing details, see our Kimi K3 pricing breakdown.
- Try it at kimi.ai
- API docs at platform.kimi.com
This page is updated as new information becomes available.