Moonshot AI releases model weights for Kimi K3 under the “Kimi K3 License”

Bloomberg 2026-07-27

Context & Ripple Effects

Moonshot had already established an open-weight path with Kimi K2.6 under a modified MIT License, then introduced K3 as a much larger model it said could compete with leading US systems. This release turns that stated distribution plan into an available artifact rather than a model-access claim.

The move matters because the K3 weights can now travel beyond Moonshot’s own service, while the named Kimi K3 License defines the terms under which that portability occurs.

First-order effects

Developers and organizations can download, alter, and self-host Kimi K3, giving them a deployment option outside Moonshot’s hosted product.
Moonshot shifts part of K3’s distribution and experimentation to users and infrastructure operators, with the Kimi K3 License becoming a practical constraint on reuse.

Second-order effects

Open-weight rivals and hosted-model providers face a sharper comparison on deployability: customers that value control or customization can evaluate K3 alongside proprietary API access.
Demand can extend from model access to complementary services—compute, hosting, fine-tuning, and support—as adopters attempt to run and adapt the released weights.

Third-order effects

If frontier-scale weights continue to be released under bespoke licenses, competition may increasingly hinge on the rights, tooling, and infrastructure around a model—not only benchmark performance.
The pattern points toward a split market in which portable weights broaden local control while license terms remain a central mechanism for governing downstream use.

The trend: Frontier AI competition is expanding from closed hosted services toward open-weight distribution paired with increasingly consequential model-specific licenses.

Discussion

@kimi_moonshot @kimi_moonshot on x
Releasing the model weights and technical report of Kimi K3. Kimi K3 is our most capable model …
@nathanbenaich Nathan Benaich on x
America being a fast follower to Chinese frontier open AI with all inference platforms hosting Kimi K3 this morning is a fun vibe shift.
@suchenzang Susan Zhang on x
there are 3 axes that issues come across when Scaling, and we can roughly bin them into: 1) sequence length (context window/attention) 2) depth (# layers) 3) width (MoE) each one comes with particular sets of bandages to constrain dynamic range (1/n) [image]
@suchenzang Susan Zhang on x
theme of k3 design: numerical stability (signal prop, precision, etc) at scale is still a Hard Problem a short🧵while reading through...
@zephyr_z9 @zephyr_z9 on x
Very impressive stuff from Kimi Training efficiency improved by 2.5x [image]
@clementdelangue Clem on x
Kimi K3 has been released on HF and already top 1 trending with 4,000+ likes in 30 mins. Fastest release growth ever so far!! [image]
@__tinygrad__ @__tinygrad__ on x
This is a great sustainable business model for open weights. It's free if you run it yourself, but if you are running a cloud providing it to others for money, you should have to share profits. (from Kimi K3 License) [image]
@zackkorman Zack Korman on x
Moonshot AI also had some problems with Kimi K3 agents trying to escape, so they just made a better sandbox. Funny how that works. The sandbox environment they run is even open source. Love the transparency here. [image]
@rauchg Guillermo Rauch on x
Kimi K3 is the most powerful open-weight model in the world. It's now available on @vercel AI Gateway from 🇺🇸 USA-based inference providers at high availability & performance. We've signed ZDR (Zero-Data Retention) agreements, which you can enable for all your token traffic.
@cognition @cognition on x
Kimi K3 is now available in Devin Desktop and CLI. On FrontierCode 1.1, Kimi K3 is the first open source model we tested that approaches frontier-level performance. [image]
@eliebakouch Elie on x
wow with kimi K3 open weights, moonshot is also open sourcing a significative improvement over deepseek deepEP which is currently used by everyone in the open (vllm/sglang), this is huge https://github.com/... [image]
@fireworksai_hq @fireworksai_hq on x
Kimi K3 is live on Fireworks. Day 0, inference and training. US-hosted, and zero data retention. This is the first frontier open model in the 3 trillion parameter class. It sports 1M context, native vision, and reasoning that rivals the top closed models. Boom. [image]
@teortaxestex @teortaxestex on x
Kimi K3 tech report does not disclose the number of training tokens A pity, because this is straight up the biggest model trained in China ever, and I suspect it's well over 2e25 FLOPs, probably 3-4e25. The report is overall great. [image]
@modal @modal on x
Kimi K3 is live on Modal. Moonshot has shipped the world's first open 3T-class model, and we're a day zero launch partner. We trained a custom DFlash speculator for K3's novel architecture so you can run it faster, losslessly. The most capable open model we've worked with by far.
@zephyr_z9 @zephyr_z9 on x
104B Active, much bigger than I thought
@kimi_moonshot @kimi_moonshot on x
We've open-sourced FlashKDA, our high-performance CUTLASS-based implementation of Kimi Delta Attention kernels. It delivers 1.72×-2.22× prefill speedup over the flash-linear-attention baseline on H20, and works as a drop-in backend for flash-linear-attention. Explore on GitHub: h…
@petergostev Peter Gostev on x
Kimi K3 License: MIT + these 2 points: 1) Large AI hosting companies earning over $20M/year need a separate agreement. 2) Products over 100M users or $20M/month revenue must display “Kimi K3.”
@eliebakouch Elie on x
this scaling law is a piece of art, kimi K3 recipe improves by ~2.5x over kimi K2 recipe the tech report is amazing [image]
@presidentlin @presidentlin on x
They updated the license it's no longer modified-mit but a kimi-k3 license. I think they found a nice balance tldr 2. …
@yuchenj_uw Yuchen Jin on x
Kimi K3 weights are open now. It is the largest open-weight model so far (2.8T parameters). It's only slightly behind Claude Fable 5 Max and GPT-5.6 Sol Max. Pretty excited about this model, and again, a Muon victory! [image]
@natolambert Nathan Lambert on x
Kimi K3 license. It's inspired by MIT but distinctly non-commercial, where any company making over $20M/yr must get a specific commercial deal (and display Kimi K3 if over 100M users or $20M/mo revenue) [image]
@nebiustf @nebiustf on x
Kimi K3 is now available on Token Factory. We're excited to announce that Nebius Token Factory …
r/Anthropic r on reddit
Anthropic makes money from its API customers, right? Well, Kimi K3's weighs went out a few minutes ago. They're in trouble.
@kevinsxu Kevin S. Xu on x
Here is how I see the Kimi K3 license works in real life: - Clause 2, the Model as a Service clause …
@perrymetzger Perry E. Metzger on x
You can download a SOTA AI model and, if you have enough hardware, just run it, customize it …
@peterom @peterom on x
I'm very happy that Kimi are going w/ a license that will let them benefit from large companies that make money off their models 3 years ago, I was a license purist but capitalism and openness must work together & this approach - similar to LTX's - feels like a nice balance
r/ClaudeCode r on reddit
Kimi K3 has become open-weights just as of a few minutes ago.
@anthropicai @anthropicai on x
There's been a lot of speculation about where we stand on open-weights models. We've outlined our views in full here: https://www.anthropic.com/...
@suchenzang Susan Zhang on x
this is actually the nicest dario has ever been about whacking china. …
@mweinbach Max Weinbach on x
I think this is a very well thought out take on why they didn't sign the letter with clear statements on values. I have no problem with it!
@aiwithsally Sally Stockholm on x
Anthropic finally addressed the open-weights drama, and the timing is interesting. …
@maria_rcks Maria on x
dont act like people cant jailbreak this exact capability out of closed frontier models. the risk is the capability, not whether the weights are open [image]
@signulll @signulll on x
anthropic finally releases their position on the broader ai ecosystem particularly w.r.t. to open weights.. which is dare i say is... entirely reasonable? [image]
@zeffmax Max Zeff on x
Dario Amodei says Anthropic is not advocating for a ban on open weight models, but instead, that there should be global safety “testing of all sufficiently capable models, open and closed.” [image]
@isolyth.dev Eris on bluesky
Anthropic claims to not want a ban on open weight models, is mainly concerned about China *entirely*, as well as biorisk from open weight models without guardrails. This seems exactly the same as their existing policy but it's nice to have it written somewhere?
r/LocalLLaMA r on reddit
Our position on open-weights models
NewsMax.com Solange Reyner on x
OpenAI CEO to Confer With WH, Congress Amid AI Push
@thsottiaux Tibo on x
Turns out GPT-5.6 Sol and friends are absolutely amazing at performance and efficiency improvements. Good time to brush up on using OpenAI models if you haven't switched already. Excited to be able to share more soon. Pretty wild.
@cheyennehaslett Cheyenne Haslett on x
NEW: Sam Altman is expected in DC on Wednesday and Thursday of this week for meetings with -Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick -Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent -White House officials -And bipartisan members on the Hill The visit comes amid questions on Hugging Face — and as the d…
@superguenter Tobi Knaup on x
I've seen this story before. Kubernetes disrupted the company I co-founded. It won by becoming the neutral substrate that engineers, cloud providers and vendors all built on. Open-weight AI is approaching the same point. A thread.

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