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Moonshot AI Releases Kimi K3, a 2.8-Trillion-Parameter Open Model That Closes In on GPT-5.6 Sol

July 18, 2026 at 18:15 EDT

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Moonshot AI on July 16, 2026 unveiled Kimi K3, a 2.8-trillion-parameter, natively multimodal model that the Chinese startup bills as "Open Frontier Intelligence" and positions as a direct challenger to OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol. The model is available immediately across Kimi.com, Kimi Work, Kimi Code and the Kimi API, with open weights scheduled to be published on July 27, 2026, according to the company's technical blog.

July 16, 2026 · Moonshot AI

Kimi K3 pulls open-weight AI into frontier territory

A 2.8-trillion-parameter, natively multimodal model billed as "Open Frontier Intelligence" — trailing GPT-5.6 Sol only slightly on raw intelligence, while matching or beating it on coding, speed and cost. Open weights arrive July 27.

2.8T

Parameters · 16 of 896 experts active per pass

~1M

Token context window

76%

Win rate, Frontend Code Arena

6.3×

Faster decoding (Kimi Delta Attention)

Output price — half the cost

Per million output tokens · taller column = higher price

$15

Kimi K3

~$30

GPT-5.6 Sol

Head to head

Independent benchmarks — the two run close

Intelligence Index

Kimi K3

GPT-5.6 Sol

Output speed (tokens/sec)

Kimi K3

GPT-5.6 Sol

Terminal-Bench 2.1

Kimi K3

88.3

GPT-5.6 Sol

88.8

Where it shines

Native text, image & video input
Design sense in game & video workflows
Stable long-running agentic work — 48h autonomous chip-design run
Open weights enable fine-tuning

Caveats to watch

Slightly behind on overall intelligence
Longer inference times reported
Usage limits in some settings
Higher hallucination rate in certain tasks

The near-term test · July 27

Once open weights ship, the question is whether the community can reproduce the benchmarks and adapt K3 at scale. If it holds up, competitive frontier capability becomes available in an open, lower-cost package.

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