Moonshot AI Releases Kimi K3: 2.8 Trillion Parameter Open-Weight Model Undercuts Western Rivals on Price

Published Jul 21, 02:59 PM UTC

Chinese AI firm Moonshot AI has released Kimi K3, a 2.8 trillion parameter open-weight model, the largest of its kind ever released. Internal benchmarks show it competing with top Western models like GPT 5.5 and Claude Opus 4.8, and it achieved the number one spot in Arena.ai's Frontend Code Arena test, beating Claude Fable 5. Kimi K3 is significantly cheaper than Western rivals, priced at $3/15 per million tokens compared to OpenAI's $5/30 and Anthropic's $10/50. However, the model is slower than frontier Western models and requires massive hardware investment, occupying up to 1.4 TB of memory. Microsoft is reportedly considering Kimi K3 for Copilot, while the White House may ban Chinese AI models. The release has revived calls for U.S. gatekeeping of international AI models, mirroring the impact of DeepSeek's R1 debut in 2025. Moonshot plans to release the model weights publicly on July 27.