Moonshot AI releases Kimi K3's weights under the “Kimi K3 License”, letting users download, tweak, and host the world's largest open-weight model to date

Moonshot AI has made its Kimi K3 model available for public download, expanding its reach and influence in the global open software community …

Bloomberg 2026-07-28

Context & Ripple Effects

Moonshot had previewed Kimi K3 as a 2.8T-parameter model and said its weights would follow; this release executes that plan after the initial Kimi K3 launch.

It also extends Moonshot's move from its earlier modified-MIT release of Kimi K2.6 toward making model weights a central distribution channel. The specific Kimi K3 License will determine how broadly that portability can be used in practice.

First-order effects

Developers and organizations can now obtain Kimi K3 weights to modify and run on infrastructure they control, subject to the Kimi K3 License, rather than relying solely on a provider-hosted endpoint.
Moonshot broadens Kimi K3's potential developer reach while retaining the license as the mechanism that defines permitted reuse and hosting.

Second-order effects

Hosting providers, tooling vendors, and enterprises evaluating Kimi K3 gain a reason to support its deployment stack, while prospective users must weigh the model's infrastructure requirements against the control offered by self-hosting.
Other model developers face added pressure to differentiate through either weight availability, license terms, model performance, or managed-service convenience as a large model becomes portable.

Third-order effects

If frontier-capable weights continue to be released under custom licenses, competition may increasingly split between portable models and the compute, distribution, and governance layers required to operate them.
The practical meaning of “open” will hinge less on downloadability alone and more on licensing and the resources needed to deploy models at scale.

The trend: Frontier AI competition is broadening from proprietary API access toward governed distribution of model weights and the infrastructure ecosystem around them.

Discussion

@kimi_moonshot @kimi_moonshot on x
Releasing the model weights and technical report of Kimi K3. Kimi K3 is our most capable model …
@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]
@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...
@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…
@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]
@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.
@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.”
@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.
@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]
@ollama @ollama on x
Kimi K3 is now available on Ollama's cloud. To use it with Claude Code, run: ollama launch claude —model kimi-k3:cloud Currently Kimi K3 requires a Pro or Max subscription, and consumes extra usage credits. We're quickly working on adding capacity to expand access.
@arena @arena on x
Big update: Among open-weight models, Kimi K3 (Max) is #1 in the Agent Arena with +9.75% net-improvement …
@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]
@notsurajgaud Suraj Gaud on x
if k3 disappears tomorrow, i got you boys. [image]
@sentdex Harrison Kinsley on x
Promises made, promises kept, Kimi K3 is now officially open weights. The license looks good and fair. Big day for open models.
@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 …
@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]
@adxtyahq Aditya on x
Reminder: you only need a $35,000/month GPU budget, or a one-time $500,000 investment, to avoid a $99/month Kimi K3 subscription.
@hsvsphere @hsvsphere on x
Based based based based based based based Do not fall for Big Labs that make Frontier Intelligence look …
@nebiustf @nebiustf on x
Kimi K3 is now available on Token Factory. We're excited to announce that Nebius Token Factory …
@zephyr_z9 @zephyr_z9 on x
Very impressive stuff from Kimi Training efficiency improved by 2.5x [image]
@teknium @teknium on x
Kimi made it to Hugging Face and is now open weights, with a paper too!
@__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]
@perrymetzger Perry E. Metzger on x
You can download a SOTA AI model and, if you have enough hardware, just run it, customize it …
@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]
@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.
@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
@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]
@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. …
@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]
@totheagi Ning on x
we got the full Kimi K3, 2.8T params, running on 80x RTX 5090s. 20 tok/s single stream, day one, untuned. …
@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]
@emollick Ethan Mollick on x
Been reading the weights of the most powerful open weights Ai model yet released. Page one starts strong: mostly negatives, a late run of zeros, and one unexpectedly large positive value. [image]
@yzhang_cs Yu Zhang on x
lost for words rn.
@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]
@zephyr_z9 @zephyr_z9 on x
104B Active, much bigger than I thought
r/GeminiAI r on reddit
How is Google getting outpaced by Kimi-K3? A tech monolith shouldn't be losing like this.
r/ClaudeCode r on reddit
Kimi K3 has become open-weights just as of a few minutes ago.
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.

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