Chinese AI startup Moonshot has launched Kimi K3, a new open-weight AI model that the company says can compete with some of the strongest models from the US.
The model has 2.8 trillion parameters, making it the world’s largest open-weight AI system, according to Moonshot. It is designed for advanced reasoning, long-horizon coding, and knowledge tasks.
Kimi K3 is the latest model in Moonshot AI’s Kimi series.
The company’s earlier Kimi K2 models were already well received in the open AI market, ranking highly on several benchmarks and showing performance close to leading frontier models.
Kimi K3 is intended to close that gap further. Reuters reported that the model comes with a 1 million-token context window, allowing it to process and retain far more information in a single prompt than earlier models.
Moonshot says Kimi K3 performs competitively with Anthropic’s Fable 5 and substantially outperforms Anthropic’s Opus 4.8, OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol, and GPT-5.5 in GPU kernel optimization.
Independent benchmarks also show strong results. Reuters reported that Arena.ai ranked Kimi K3 first in a benchmark for web interface-building capabilities, while Vals AI placed it second overall behind Fable 5 and ahead of GPT-5.6 Sol. Artificial Analysis said the model delivered performance comparable to GPT-5.5 and Claude Opus 4.8, especially on complex multi-step tasks.
The launch comes amid growing debate over whether businesses should keep paying for expensive closed-source AI models from companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic.
Open-weight models allow users to download, run, and customize the underlying system, unlike closed models that remain controlled by their developers. That has made models from Chinese companies such as Moonshot, DeepSeek, and Z.ai more attractive to some businesses looking for cheaper and more flexible AI options.
However, Kimi K3’s size also creates a practical limitation. Reuters noted that running a 2.8 trillion-parameter model locally would require very expensive computing hardware, meaning most users are unlikely to host it themselves.
Moonshot is also reportedly raising more capital as investor interest grows.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Moonshot is being valued at $31.5 billion in an ongoing funding round. In May, the company raised $2 billion at a valuation above $20 billion, according to the South China Morning Post.
The company is backed by major Chinese technology investors, including Alibaba and Tencent.
Kimi K3 adds to the view that Chinese AI companies are closing the performance gap with US labs.
Reuters noted that Moonshot, Z.ai, MiniMax, DeepSeek, and other Chinese firms are releasing increasingly powerful models at lower cost. Analysts say this is challenging the earlier assumption that Chinese AI developers were many months behind their American competitors.
The launch also puts more pressure on closed AI labs to justify higher prices, especially as open-weight models continue to improve in coding, reasoning, and agent-based tasks.
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