Moonshot puts the Kimi K3 weights on Hugging Face — under a licence that bills large model-as-a-service resellers

Moonshot AI has published the Kimi K3 weights on Hugging Face: 2.8 trillion total parameters with 104 billion activated per token, a 16-of-896 mixture-of-experts layout, a 1-million-token context window and MXFP4 weight quantisation. The terms are not the "modified MIT" framing the company used for earlier releases — the Kimi K3 Licence requires a separate agreement for model-as-a-service businesses above roughly $20 million of revenue in any 12 months. Simon Willison noted on 27 July 2026 that OpenRouter is already serving K3 from several providers at pricing close to Moonshot’s own.

What it means Open weights at frontier scale are only useful if you read the licence first: the revenue threshold is what decides whether self-hosting K3 is a free build or a contract negotiation.