Moonshot AI, the Chinese company behind the Kimi K3 model launched earlier this month, has released the model weights, allowing users to access the open weight model for their own use cases.
The Kimi K3 model weights were released in accordance with the earlier deadline shared by the company.
The AI platform Hugging Face noted that both the code repository and the model weights were released under the Kimi K3 License.
“Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person (the “Licensee”) obtaining a copy of this software — including the model weights, parameters, configuration files, inference and training code, and associated documentation (collectively, the “Software”) — to deal in the Software without restriction,” stated the first part of the Moonshot AI license.
However, there were additional conditions, with the license noting that if the user operates the model as a service business, and the aggregate revenue exceeds 20 million U.S. dollars over any consecutive 12 months, the user will need to enter into an agreement with Moonshot AI.
Moonshot AI had stated that Kimi K3 was the first open model to reach 2.8 trillion parameters. It also has a 1 million-token context window.
The model’s release sparked debate worldwide about whether Chinese open-weight models offering more user accessibility at lower costs could compete with closed U.S. models.
“Alongside Kimi K3, we’re opening up more of the stack behind it — high-performance attention kernels, MoE communication library, and infrastructure for running agent environments at scale,” posted the company on X on July 27.
At the time of release, Moonshot AI noted that Kimi K3 showed frontier-level performance across its evaluation suite, even if its overall performance still trailed models such as Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5 and OpenAI’s GPT 5.6 Sol.
