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Kimi K3

Canonical page on the main site: sinoaihub.com/models/kimi-k3

Type

model

Definition

Kimi K3 is a Moonshot AI model in the Kimi K-series family: MoE: 2.8T total / 104B activated; 93 layers (1 dense); 896 experts (16 selected + 2 shared per token); 69 KDA + 24 Gated MLA layers; hidden dim 7168; SiTU-GLU; MoonViT-V2 vision encoder (401M); MXFP4 weights / MXFP8 activations; 1,048,576-token context window; 1,048,576 max output; open-weight; Kimi K3 License (permissive MIT-style, but Model-as-a-Service operators with >$20M aggregate revenue over any 12 months must sign a separate agreement; products with >100M MAU or >$20M monthly revenue must display 'Kimi K3' in the UI) license; released 2026-07-16.

Key facts

  • Architecture: MoE: 2.8T total / 104B activated; 93 layers (1 dense); 896 experts (16 selected + 2 shared per token); 69 KDA + 24 Gated MLA layers; hidden dim 7168; SiTU-GLU; MoonViT-V2 vision encoder (401M); MXFP4 weights / MXFP8 activations
  • Context window: 1,048,576 tokens (max output 1,048,576)
  • Weights: open; Kimi K3 License (permissive MIT-style, but Model-as-a-Service operators with >$20M aggregate revenue over any 12 months must sign a separate agreement; products with >100M MAU or >$20M monthly revenue must display 'Kimi K3' in the UI) license
  • API pricing: $3.0 input / $15.0 output per 1M tokens (USD)
  • Released: 2026-07-16
  • Capabilities: reasoning, coding, vision, tool calling

Provider

moonshot-ai

Model Family

Kimi K-series

Release Date

2026-07-16

Status

active

Architecture

MoE: 2.8T total / 104B activated; 93 layers (1 dense); 896 experts (16 selected + 2 shared per token); 69 KDA + 24 Gated MLA layers; hidden dim 7168; SiTU-GLU; MoonViT-V2 vision encoder (401M); MXFP4 weights / MXFP8 activations

Parameter Information

  • total_parameters: 2.8T
  • active_parameters: 104B

Context Window

1048576

Maximum Output

1048576

Capabilities

  • reasoning: Yes
  • coding: Yes
  • vision: Yes
  • video: Yes
  • tool_calling: Yes
  • structured_output: Yes
  • agent_capability: Yes

Open Weight

Yes

License

Kimi K3 License (permissive MIT-style, but Model-as-a-Service operators with >$20M aggregate revenue over any 12 months must sign a separate agreement; products with >100M MAU or >$20M monthly revenue must display 'Kimi K3' in the UI)

Self Hosting

Yes

Api Available

Yes

Pricing

  • input_price_per_1m: 3.0
  • output_price_per_1m: 15.0
  • currency: USD
  • pricing_ref: moonshot-ai

Official Api

Yes

Cloud Providers

  • Moonshot AI Platform

Benchmark Results

benchmark score metric date source_type source_url
GPQA Diamond 93.5 accuracy 2026-07 vendor_reported https://github.com/MoonshotAI/Kimi-K3
HLE-Full 43.5 (56.0 with tools) accuracy 2026-07 vendor_reported https://github.com/MoonshotAI/Kimi-K3
DeepSWE 67.5 accuracy 2026-07 vendor_reported https://github.com/MoonshotAI/Kimi-K3
Terminal-Bench 2.1 88.3 accuracy 2026-07 vendor_reported https://github.com/MoonshotAI/Kimi-K3
MMMU-Pro 81.6 accuracy 2026-07 vendor_reported https://github.com/MoonshotAI/Kimi-K3
Video-MME (with subtitles) 90.0 accuracy 2026-07 vendor_reported https://github.com/MoonshotAI/Kimi-K3

Known Limitations

  • Temperature fixed at 1.0 and top_p at 0.95 - cannot be modified
  • API access requires a minimum $1 top-up
  • Modality documentation inconsistent: architecture table says Text+Image, while the README, launch blog and API guide also show video input
  • Benchmarks vendor-reported; some comparison scores cited from Artificial Analysis

Verification Status

verified

License Changes

No documented license changes on record as of 2026-09-29.

Last Verified

2026-09-20

Source history

No documented source-change events located as of 2026-09-20.

Sources

evidence_id source_name source_url source_type published verified confidence conflict
src-models-kimi-k3-1 Kimi K3 GitHub README https://github.com/MoonshotAI/Kimi-K3 Official documentation — 2026-09-20 high —
src-models-kimi-k3-2 Kimi API platform — model list https://platform.kimi.ai/docs/models.md Official documentation — 2026-09-20 high —
src-models-kimi-k3-3 Kimi API — Chat Completions spec https://platform.kimi.ai/docs/api/chat.md Official documentation — 2026-09-20 high —
src-models-kimi-k3-4 Kimi K3 launch blog https://www.kimi.com/blog/kimi-k3 Official 2026-07-16 2026-09-20 high —