Kimi K3
by Moonshot AI
Frontier flagship (July 2026). 2.8T parameters, 1M context, KDA hybrid attention, always-on reasoning, native multimodal, 300 Agent Swarm, open weights. Ranks #3 on Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, #1 on Arena.ai frontend code.
Release
- Date: July 16, 2026
- Open weights: July 27, 2026 (Modified MIT)
- Parameters: 2.8T total / ~50B active
Architecture
Attention:
- KDA (Kimi Delta Attention): 3:1 hybrid linear-to-full attention
- Attention Residual (AttnRes) for information flow
- MXFP4 weights, MXFP8 activations
Scaling:
- 896 experts, 16 active per token
- 2.5× better compute-to-intelligence vs K2
- 6.3× faster long-context decoding
Capabilities
Context:
- 1 million tokens (~750K words)
- 64K max output
- 6.3× faster decoding than K2 for long-context
Multimodal:
- Native vision (MoonViT-3D)
- Image + text at 1M context (unique)
- Charts, diagrams, documents
Reasoning:
- Always-on by default
- Multi-step decomposition
- 300 Agent Swarm (4K+ coordinated steps)
Benchmarks
- Artificial Analysis: Rank #3 overall
- Arena.ai Frontend Code: Rank #1
- Agentic: ~89.5% (5th frontier capability)
- Real-world: 5 of 6 wins vs Claude Sonnet 5
Pricing
- Input: 0.30/M)
- Output: $15/M
- Cost advantage: 50-65% per-task vs Claude Sonnet 5
Availability
- Hosted:
platform.kimi.ai,kimi.com - Open weights: Hugging Face (July 27)
- Self-hosting: vLLM support announced
Positioning
- Frontier-class reasoning + agentic autonomy
- Open-weight advantage vs Claude/GPT
- Cost-efficient for complex tasks
- Chinese AI flagship release