What Is Kimi K3? Moonshot’s 2.5T-Parameter, 1M-Context Flagship

Kimi K3 is Moonshot AI's unreleased next-generation large language model, first surfaced on July 14, 2026 via a leaked page on Moonshot's own Kimi Open Platform and not yet officially announced. Pre-release leaks describe it as a new-architecture Mixture-of-Experts model with roughly 2.5 trillion total parameters and a 1-million-token context window, aimed at long-horizon coding and agent workloads. The clearest hard signal is a limited-time top-up promotion tied to a July 15, 2026 00:00 China time launch, with bonus credits of 10–30% on API recharges through August 11.

Key Takeaways

• Kimi K3 is Moonshot AI's next flagship model, following the Kimi K2 family (K2, K2.5, K2.6, K2.7 Code).
• No official model card, benchmarks, pricing, or weights have been published as of July 15, 2026.
• A leaked Moonshot API platform page pointed to a July 15 launch tied to a recharge promotion running through August 11.
• Community leaks cite a ~2.5T-parameter MoE architecture and a 1M-token context window; both are unconfirmed.
• Moonshot's $500M Series C, closed January 2026 at a $4.3B valuation, was explicitly earmarked for K3 development and compute expansion.
• Early beta and arena testers describe K3 as competitive with top-tier closed coding models on some evaluations, with caveats about which benchmark harness is used.

What Is Kimi K3?

Kimi K3 is the third-generation model in Moonshot AI's Kimi series, positioned as the successor to the Kimi K2 family that shipped between July 2025 and mid-2026. Moonshot AI is a Beijing-based startup best known for the Kimi chatbot and for releasing K2 under a Modified MIT license, which made it one of the strongest open-weight models of 2025.

CEO Yang Zhilin has publicly acknowledged K3 as the company's next major generation. Moonshot's January 2026 $500 million Series C at a $4.3 billion valuation was reported to fund "computing capacity and developing the K3 model," per The Decoder's coverage of the round.

As of July 15, 2026, Kimi K3 is unreleased. The model has not appeared on Moonshot's public API listings, the official kimi.com product surface still features K2.6 and K2.7 Code, and no model card, license, or benchmark table has been published. What exists publicly is: a leaked promotional page, community sightings in a beta model selector and an evaluation arena, and pre-release rumors about architecture and scale.

Source: @LuminaXspace

Kimi K3 at a Glance

Attribute	Value
Developer	Moonshot AI
Type	Large language model, reportedly Mixture-of-Experts
Modality	Text; multimodal capabilities rumored, not confirmed
Total parameters	~2.5T (unconfirmed, community leak)
Active parameters	Not yet confirmed
Context window	~1M tokens (unconfirmed, community leak)
Architecture	New architecture, distinct from K2 series (unconfirmed)
License	Not yet confirmed; K2 family used Modified MIT
API pricing	Not yet published
Launch date	July 15, 2026 (per leaked promo page; unconfirmed by Moonshot)
Availability	Beta model selector and arena, per community reports; no public API listing
Predecessor	Kimi K2.7 Code / K2.6 (1T MoE, 32B active, 256K context)

Every "unconfirmed" cell in this table reflects a real gap — none of these numbers have been ratified by Moonshot AI as of publication.

How Kimi K3 Works and What Makes It Different

Kimi K3 is described in the leaks as built on a "new architectural innovation" rather than a straight scale-up of the K2-series MoE. The Kimi K2 family, by contrast, keeps a stable blueprint across versions: 1 trillion total parameters, 32 billion active per token, 384 routed experts plus 1 shared expert, Multi-head Latent Attention, and SwiGLU activation with native INT4 quantization, per a third-party K2 architecture writeup that summarizes Moonshot's published technical reports.

For K3, several distinct architectural hints appear across the bundle:

• Community researcher Teortaxes speculated on hardware and algorithmic choices, saying "I expect it to be the most advanced base model yet. I want to see AttnRes, modality vision, Kimi-Linear+ on 2T+ scale," in a post on July 7, 2026.
• One commenter on the r/kimi subreddit noted Moonshot has "been publishing papers that mentioned '1T internal hybrid linear model,'" suggesting exploration of hybrid linear attention variants, in the Reddit launch thread.
• Leaked spec-sheet screenshots circulating on July 14 reference terms like DSA and "Kimi residual attention," with claims of the sparsest MoE ratio yet and native 4-bit training. These originate in community posts and are unverified.

The consistent thread across leaks is a focus on long-horizon agent tasks, large-scale parallel search and execution (sometimes labeled K3 Agent Swarm), and stronger coding stamina. This lines up with Moonshot's direction in K2.6 and K2.7 Code, which already emphasized multi-hour autonomous runs and thousands-of-tool-calls sessions.

Three anchor terms recur enough across the bundle to be worth tracking as the model's identity crystallizes: K3 Agent Swarm, long-horizon agent workloads, and new architectural innovation. None are officially defined yet.

What You Can Do With Kimi K3

Because K3 is unreleased, use cases are inferred from Moonshot's positioning, K2.7 Code's actual capabilities, and early-tester reports. Based on the bundle:

• Long-session autonomous coding. K2.6 already demonstrated 12–13 hour autonomous coding runs with thousands of tool calls, and community expectation is that K3 pushes this further under the K3 Agent Swarm framing.
• Large-context research and analysis. If the rumored 1M-token context ships, K3 would sit in the same tier as long-context flagships for whole-repository code review, long document synthesis, and multi-document research.
• Coding agent backends. Early tester ChrissGPT positioned K3 as "an Opus 4.7+ coding model" that "outperforms GPT 5.5 and GPT 5.6 Terra on SOME coding Evals," while noting that Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol still dominate on Terminal-Bench 2.1, in a July 14 post.
• Multi-agent orchestration. K2.6 shipped Claw Groups for coordinating heterogeneous external agents; K3 is expected to extend this pattern, though specifics are unconfirmed.

Treat every one of these as directional until Moonshot publishes a model card and independent benchmarks land.

How Kimi K3 Compares

The most useful comparison is against Kimi's own K2 family, since that is the only apples-to-apples baseline available.

Model	Total params	Active params	Context	License	Status
Kimi K2 (Jul 2025)	1T	32B	256K	Modified MIT	Released, EOL May 2026
Kimi K2.6 (Apr 2026)	1T	32B	256K	Modified MIT	Released
Kimi K2.7 Code (Jun 2026)	1T	32B	256K	Modified MIT	Released
Kimi K3	~2.5T (unconfirmed)	Not yet confirmed	~1M (unconfirmed)	Not yet confirmed	Unreleased

K3 is also being read against contemporary releases — DeepSeek V4 and the rumored GLM-5.x are the most-cited comparisons in community threads. For the V4 context, see our earlier analysis of the DeepSeek V4 release signals. For the parallel flagship-frontier picture at Western labs, our writeup on the Grok 4.5 leak and the 1.5T V9 foundation covers the same competitive window.

Availability: How to Access Kimi K3

Public API: Not available. Moonshot's platform continues to list K2.6, K2.7 Code, and legacy K2 variants; K3 has no published model ID, endpoint, or pricing.

Weights: Not available. Moonshot has not published a Hugging Face model card, a license, or a weights download for K3. The K2 family precedent is open-weight under Modified MIT, but K3's licensing is unconfirmed.

Beta and arena access: According to community reports on July 14, 2026, K3 was visible in a limited-access beta model selector on Moonshot's site and available for testing in an evaluation arena. Lumina posted that "K3 will use a completely new architecture focused on long-horizon agent tasks" and that "no official benchmarks or model card have appeared yet," in a July 14 breakdown.

Consumer app: Not available in the Kimi consumer app as of publication.

Timing signals: The strongest is the leaked "Kimi K3 launch limited-time recharge campaign" page discovered on Moonshot's own API platform, which announced a promotion beginning July 15 at 00:00 China time. Chubby posted the promo structure: "¥99–¥499: 10% bonus / ¥500–¥1,999: 20% bonus / ¥2,000–¥4,999: 25% bonus / ¥5,000 or more: 30% bonus," running through August 11, in a July 14 post. Chris noted later the same day that the model had not shipped in US time zones by end-of-day July 14, in a follow-up post.

For local inference, developer Max Weinbach flagged the hardware ceiling early: "I'm getting my mac studio cluster ready for Kimi K3 but I'm pretty sure I'm hitting the limits of what 1.5TB if memory can do for a 2.5T parameter 1M context model," in a July 14 post. A 2.5T-parameter model stretches even top-end workstation setups.

What We Don't Know Yet

The gaps as of July 15, 2026:

• Exact public launch timing. The July 15 China-time promo start is the strongest signal, but Moonshot has not posted an official announcement.
• Confirmed architecture. MoE ratio, active parameter count, attention scheme, and whether "new architecture" means hybrid linear attention, a different expert routing scheme, or something else entirely.
• Confirmed scale. The 2.5T total parameter figure originates in an April 2026 Chinese report and has been repeated across leaks; no primary Moonshot source ratifies it.
• Context window. Whether 1M tokens ships at launch, and at what latency and price tier.
• Multimodal scope. Rumors mention image, audio, and text input; nothing is confirmed.
• License and weights. Whether K3 continues the K2 family's Modified MIT open-weight pattern.
• Independent benchmarks. No third-party evaluations on SWE-Bench Verified, Terminal-Bench 2.1, HLE, or agent-specific harnesses yet.
• API pricing per token. Only the recharge promotion structure has leaked; per-MTok input/output rates are unpublished.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Kimi K3?

Kimi K3 is the next-generation large language model from Moonshot AI, the Beijing-based company behind the Kimi chatbot and the Kimi K2 open-weight family. As of July 15, 2026, K3 has not been officially released; a leaked Moonshot API platform page pointed to a launch tied to a top-up promotion that begins July 15 at 00:00 China time.

When is Kimi K3 being released?

Kimi K3's release has not been officially announced. A limited-time recharge campaign page briefly appeared on Moonshot's own API platform indicating a July 15, 2026 (China time) start date, and community accounts reported the model was visible in a beta selector and in an evaluation arena on July 14. Chris noted the model had not shipped in US time zones by end-of-day July 14.

How many parameters does Kimi K3 have?

Kimi K3's parameter count is unconfirmed. Pre-release leaks and community reports point to a Mixture-of-Experts architecture in the 2.5-trillion-parameter range, with some sources citing 2–3T total parameters. Moonshot has not published an official model card or specification sheet.

Is Kimi K3 open source?

Kimi K3's licensing has not been announced. Moonshot AI released the prior Kimi K2 family under a Modified MIT license with open weights, and community expectation is that K3 will follow the same pattern, but this is unconfirmed until Moonshot publishes the license and weights.

How much does Kimi K3 cost?

Kimi K3's per-token API pricing has not been published. The only pricing signal so far is a leaked top-up promotion page on Moonshot's platform offering 10–30% bonus credits on recharges between ¥99 and ¥5,000+, running July 15 through August 11. For reference, Kimi K2.6 launched at $0.60 input / $2.50 output per million tokens.

What is Kimi K3's context window?

Kimi K3's context window is unconfirmed. Community leaks reference a 1-million-token context window, and one developer preparing local inference on a 1.5TB Mac Studio cluster described K3 as a "2.5T parameter 1M context model." Moonshot has not confirmed the number, and it is unclear whether 1M context ships at launch or at what price tier.

Kimi K3 vs Kimi K2 — what's different?

The Kimi K2 family is a 1-trillion-parameter MoE with 32B active parameters and a 256K context window, released under a Modified MIT license in July 2025. Kimi K3 is reportedly a larger new-architecture model targeting long-horizon agent workloads, with community leaks citing roughly 2.5T total parameters and a 1M-token context, though official specifications have not been published.

Where can I try Kimi K3?

Kimi K3 is not yet available on Moonshot's public API or on kimi.com; the platform still lists K2.6 and K2.7 Code as current models. Community accounts on July 14, 2026 reported K3 appearing in a limited-access beta model selector and in an evaluation arena, but there is no public access path yet.

What to Watch Next

Three concrete signals will move this page from "leaked" to "confirmed": an official Moonshot AI or @Kimi_Moonshot announcement post with a model card link; a Hugging Face repository landing with a license, weights, and configuration file that ratifies the parameter count and context window; and independent benchmark runs on SWE-Bench Verified and Terminal-Bench 2.1 that test the "Opus 4.7+ coding" claim against a comparable harness. This page will be updated in place as each lands.

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