The Beijing-based startup is making its 2.8-trillion-parameter model available to developers to download, modify, and host
Bloomberg / Getty Images
Moonshot AI will make the weights of its Kimi K3 model available for unrestricted public download on Monday, giving developers the freedom to deploy, adapt, and self-host it. Founder Yang Zhilin has said the company wants to grow its user base through openness and broader availability than competing proprietary systems in the U.S., according to Bloomberg.
With 2.8 trillion parameters, Kimi K3 holds the distinction of being the largest open-weight model publicly available, according to Bloomberg. Its context window stretches to one million tokens, meaning users can feed entire large codebases or lengthy documents into a single query. A technical report covering the model's design, how it was trained, and how it performs on standard benchmarks is expected to follow the weight release.
The weight release follows Kimi K3's debut last week, which sent Chinese AI competitor stocks sharply lower. Z.ai stock lost as much as 30% of its value in Hong Kong trading, MiniMax Group stock fell as much as 16%, and Alibaba stock dropped 4%. Arena blind evaluations showed developers selecting Kimi K3 ahead of leading U.S. models on front-end coding tasks. The model placed below Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 and OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol in overall rankings but outperformed both companies' prior-generation models across coding and general agent evaluations.
Since K3 launched, Moonshot's daily revenue has grown by a factor of at least six. The company reached $300 million in annual recurring revenue in June, up from $200 million in April, and is seeking a new funding round at a $50 billion valuation ahead of a potential Hong Kong initial public offering as soon as this year.
The release arrives amid scrutiny from Washington. White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Director Michael Kratsios accused Moonshot last week of training K3 using banned Nvidia $NVDA chips and conducting large-scale distillation against U.S. models, including Anthropic's Fable model. Moonshot has not responded to requests for comment on the allegations.
Monday's weight release is expected to benefit cloud computing providers that specialize in hosting third-party open models. None of the three major hyperscale cloud platforms — Amazon $AMZN AWS Bedrock, Microsoft $MSFT Azure Foundry, or Google $GOOGL Vertex AI — have integrated Kimi K3 or comparable Chinese open-weight models into their offerings, Bloomberg Intelligence analysts Mandeep Singh and William Tong noted.
Join 500,000+ readers who start their day with Quartz.
By subscribing, you agree to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.
