Moonshot launches Kimi K3 — a 2.8-trillion-parameter frontier model, and its open weights are already live

Chinese AI lab Moonshot released Kimi K3: 2.8 trillion parameters, native vision, and a 1-million-token context window — the largest open-weight model ever released (weights promised by July 27 landed early — community GGUF quantizations appeared on Hugging Face by July 18, and OpenRouter has served the model since its July 16 launch). Moonshot says it trails only Claude Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol on its own evaluations; independent testing by Artificial Analysis puts its long-horizon knowledge-work score behind only Claude Fable 5, at roughly half the per-task cost of Opus 4.8. API pricing is $3/$15 per million tokens — Claude Sonnet-level, and the most expensive Chinese-lab model to date.

What it means With the weights live, near-frontier capability is self-hostable today — and the Sonnet-level pricing signals Chinese labs are no longer competing on price alone.