Moonshot AI

Kimi K3

Released Jul 16, 2026 · knowledge cutoff unpublished

Status: Superseded
Location: China
Type: LLM
Modality: Multimodal
Context window: 1M
Max output: 131K
Speed (max effort): 38 tok/s · 3.55s to first answer token
Price ($/MTok in / out): $3 / $15
Cost per task: $0.72
Open weights: Yes

Benchmarks6 of 10 reported

GPQA Diamond

93.5%

Terminal-Bench 2.1

88.3%

Humanity's Last Exam

43.5%

LMArena Elo

1486

GDPval-AA v2

1668

ARC-AGI-2

60.4%

MMLU-Proretired

—

SWE-bench Verified

—

SWE-bench Pro

—

AIME (latest)retired

—

Strengths & weaknesses

Strengths

Agentic browsing and long-horizon coding are where it feels genuinely frontier-class
Native tool-calling conventions that drop into existing agent stacks without adapters
Reads images and long documents natively, unlike earlier Kimi releases

Weaknesses

Slow and very verbose — every request goes through a reasoning pass with no way to switch it off
The effort dial shipped locked at maximum, so cheap quick calls aren't possible
Factual reliability went backwards: it states wrong answers more confidently than K2 did

MMLU-Pro, AIME 2025, and SWE-bench Verified are unconfirmed or conflicting in third-party coverage (AIME cited as both 88% and 96.1%) so left null; Moonshot's own suite reports Terminal-Bench 2.1 at 88.3 and SWE Marathon at 42.0 instead. HLE is 43.5% no tools / 56.0% with tools. Artificial Analysis ranks K3 #3 on its Intelligence Index at 57, with GDPval-AA v2 Elo 1668 (K2.6: 1190), AA-Omniscience +18 on 46% accuracy, and $0.94 per index task at $3.00/$15.00 per MTok — but its hallucination rate regressed to 51% from K2.6's 39%. Weights landed on 2026-07-26 — 96 safetensors shards totalling roughly 1.56 TB, native MXFP4 with MXFP8 activations — under a bespoke Kimi K3 License that attaches conditions to large model-as-a-service and very large commercial deployments, rather than the MIT terms earlier Kimi releases carried. Licence is Moonshot's bespoke Kimi K3 License (MIT-derived, with attribution above 100M MAU / $20M monthly revenue and a separate agreement for large Model-as-a-Service operators), classified restricted; ordinary commercial use is permitted outright. ARC-AGI-2 60.4% is ARC Prize-verified at max effort ($1.59/task; high 55.0%, low 12.4%), published 2026-07-16 at arcprize.org/results/moonshot-kimi-k3.

For developers

API model strings

moonshotkimi-k3

Licence

Kimi K3 License · Restricted · commercial use permitted

Retirement

No retirement announced

Lineage

No recorded predecessor