Summary
On July 16, 2026, Moonshot AI launched Kimi K3, a sparse mixture-of-experts model with 2.8 trillion total parameters, native vision, and a 1-million-token context window, available immediately through the Kimi app, Playground, and API. Moonshot calls it the first open model in the 3-trillion-parameter class and has committed to releasing full open weights and a technical report on July 27, 2026.
What changed
Moonshot AI made Kimi K3 available via app, Playground, and API on July 16, 2026, introducing two architectural changes -- Kimi Delta Attention (KDA) and Attention Residuals (AttnRes) -- with open weights scheduled for July 27.
Why it matters
Kimi K3 pushes the frontier of openly available models: early benchmarks placed it ahead of Claude Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.5 while pricing near lower-tier commercial models, giving developers a very large, long-context model they can eventually self-host. The gap between the API launch and the July 27 weights release means real-world reliability is still unproven.
Evidence excerpt
Moonshot AI released Kimi K3, a 2.8-trillion-parameter open MoE model with Kimi Delta Attention and a 1M-token context, live through the Kimi app, Playground, and API, with full weights promised July 27, 2026.