Moonshot AI launches Kimi K3, a 2.8T-parameter open-weight model
Moonshot AI
Moonshot AI released Kimi K3 on July 16, 2026, a 2.8-trillion-parameter Mixture-of-Experts model (16 of 896 experts active per token) built on a new Kimi Delta Attention architecture, with a 1-million-token context window and native vision support. Two variants shipped: K3 Max for chat/agent tasks and K3 Swarm Max for large-scale parallel processing, first available via Kimi Code and the Kimi app. Full open weights are promised by July 27, 2026.
Why it matters
K3 posts the strongest published open-weight scores on several benchmarks (93.5% GPQA Diamond, 91.2% BrowseComp) and self-reported results mostly beating Claude Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.5 high, signaling that Chinese open-weight labs continue closing the gap with frontier closed models.
Importance: 4/5
Largest open-weight model released to date with SOTA-competitive benchmarks; confirmed by the lab's own blog plus VentureBeat and Simon Willison coverage.