Kimi K3 models

Strongest: Kimi K3

Kimi K3 is Moonshot AI's flagship and the first model of its third generation, released in July 2026: a 2.8-trillion-parameter mixture-of-experts (104B active) with native image and video input, a 1,048,576-token context window, always-on reasoning, and full weights on Hugging Face under the custom Kimi K3 License. Moonshot calls it the first open model to reach 2.8 trillion parameters, and it is the highest-rated open-weights entry on LMArena's Text board (1485, rank 17), its Coding category (1538, rank 7) and the separate WebDev arena (1674, rank 5). Moonshot's own tables place it just behind Claude Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol, and Moonshot says so plainly; Vals AI's independent ProgramBench run puts it further back than Moonshot's chart does. At $3.00/$15.00 per 1M tokens it costs 1.5 to 3.8 times as much per token as the other open flagships and 25% less than GPT-5.6 Sol. Buy it for open weights at near-frontier quality, and budget for its speed, its license terms and Moonshot's default data-use policy.