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The Beijing-based startup released Kimi K3, a 2.8 trillion-parameter model that Moonshot calls the first open model in the 3 trillion-parameter class.
It runs on a new architecture the company built in-house, comes with a 1-million-token context window, and is live now inside the Kimi app, the Kimi Work desktop tool, and Kimi’s coding assistant.
Moonshot’s own benchmark data shows K3 trailing Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5 and OpenAI’s GPT 5.6 Sol overall, though it beats most other models it was tested against.
What Kimi K3 is actually good at
Moonshot didn’t just publish a spec sheet. It ran K3 through a kernel optimization test against four other models, including Fable 5 and GPT 5.6 Sol, and reported that K3 performed competitively with Fable 5 while clearly beating Opus 4.8, GPT 5.6 Sol, and GPT 5.5 on that specific task.
On a coding benchmark called Terminal Bench 2.1, K3 scored higher than Fable 5, Opus 4.8, and GPT 5.5, though it still landed just behind GPT 5.6 Sol.
These aren’t sweeping wins. They’re specific, and Moonshot is transparent that the full picture still favors the two Western frontier models.
The part most companies wouldn’t admit
Moonshot’s own release notes list K3’s weaknesses in plain language. The model can make unexpected decisions on its own during long tasks if it hits ambiguous instructions, and Moonshot says there’s a noticeable gap in overall user experience compared with Fable 5 and GPT 5.6 Sol.
I’ve read a lot of launch posts. Most of them bury the bad news, if they mention it at all. Seeing a company put its own shortcomings next to its wins in the same document is rare enough that it’s worth pointing out on its own.
What this means for the price you’re paying
Here’s where it gets interesting for anyone building on top of these models instead of just chatting with them.
Moonshot’s official API pricing runs 30 cents per million tokens for cached input, 3 dollars for fresh input, and 15 dollars for output. Full open weights, the kind developers can download and run themselves, are scheduled to ship by July 27.
Kimi K3 isn’t the model that dethrones Fable 5 or GPT 5.6 Sol. It’s the model that makes both of them a little more expensive to justify.
