Kimi K3 released

Kimi K3, the newest model from Chinese lab Moonshot AI, has been released (blog post). It’s a big model - 2.8T parameters.

Capability & Pricing

Artificial Analysis has it at GPT-5.6 Terra/Sol capability level, but it’s also priced that way - making it the most expensive Chinese model:

The only reasoning mode currently offered is “max”, with additional reasoning modes planned. Accordingly, Simon Willison’s Pelican test cost him 25 cents with K3 (GPT-5.6 Sol @medium cost him 10.55 cents, @max cost him 48.55 cents).

Writing

Its predecessor Kimi K2.6 was lauded for its Writing capabilities. The same may be true for K3, taking first place at a Writing benchmark:

Louis-François Bouchard 🎥🤖@Whats_AI

Big news from our internal writing benchmark (early results): Kimi K3 by @Kimi_Moonshot is now #1 for writing in our editorial voice, at 2840 Elo, surpassing Claude Fable 5. That is a jump from #21 to #1 over its predecessor, Kimi K2.6. And it runs at about $0.25 per script: 5x

Kimi.ai @Kimi_Moonshot

Introducing Kimi K3: Open Frontier Intelligence 🔹 2.8 Trillion Parameters, 1 Million Context, Native Multimodal 🔹 Kimi Delta Attention enables up to 6.3x faster decoding in million-token contexts 🔹 Attention Residuals deliver ~25% higher training efficiency at <2% additional

8:58 PM · Jul 16, 2026 · 140K Views

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34 Replies · 93 Reposts · 1.03K Likes

In the EQ-Bench Creative Writing benchmark, K3 also scores at #1, comfortably ahead of GPT-5.6 Sol.

Availability

It’s currently only available from Moonshot AI in China, with OpenRouter supporting it as a frontend. (I have added support via OpenRouter to MyChatty). An open release is planned for the end of this month.