Moonshot AI launches Kimi K3, a frontier open-weight model rivaling top U.S. AI systems

Chinese AI startup Moonshot AI has unveiled Kimi K3, a 2.8-trillion-parameter open-weight model that ranks among the world's most powerful artificial intelligence systems and narrows the performance gap with top U.S. rivals like Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 and OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol. Released on July 16, 2026, the model features a 1-million-token context window and demonstrates frontier-level capabilities in coding, agentic reasoning, and multimodal tasks, scoring 57.1 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index to place fourth globally behind only Claude and GPT-5.6 Sol. Kimi K3 is available now via API at $3 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens—roughly one-third the price of comparable Western models—and will release its full weights under a Modified MIT license on July 27, marking the first time a Chinese model has entered the global frontier pack of independent open-source AI tests.