Kimi K3
Moonshot AI's 16 Jul 2026 flagship and the clearest evidence that the open-weight tier has caught the frontier: a 2.8-trillion-parameter MoE (16 of 896 experts routed per token, Stable LatentMoE, MXFP4 weights) with a 1,048,576-token context and native text, vision, and video input. Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index 57, ranking #3 overall behind only Claude Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol, and ahead of every other proprietary model on the board. It beats GLM-5.2 across Moonshot's harness — DeepSWE 67.5 vs 46.2, FrontierSWE 81.2 vs 67.3, SWE Marathon 42.0 vs 13.0, Terminal-Bench 2.1 88.3 vs 82.7, GPQA-Diamond 93.5 vs 91.2 — and tops the open board on Humanity's Last Exam (56%) and BrowseComp (91.2). At $3/$15 it undercuts both Claude Opus 5 ($5/$25) and GPT-5.6 Sol ($5/$30) on input and output while scoring higher on independent benchmarks. Two caveats: K3 is a heavy token consumer, and it is a genuine cost outlier among open models at ~$0.94 per task versus DeepSeek V4 Pro's $0.04. Weights shipped on Hugging Face at moonshotai/Kimi-K3 (2.8T total, 104B active) under Moonshot's own Kimi K3 License rather than a standard open licence, so read the terms before building on it. Hallucination rate rose to 51% from K2.6's 39% — cross-check factual output.
1M
tokens
33K
tokens
$3
per 1M tokens
$15
per 1M tokens
55
tokens/sec
Jul 2026
2026-07-16
$9.00
per 1M tokens
10.8
quality per $
Capabilities
Benchmarks
Price vs Quality
Context Window in Context
- GPT-5.6 Sol1.1M
- GPT-5.6 Terra1.1M
- GPT-5.6 Luna1.1M
- ▸ Kimi K31.0M
- GPT-4.11M
- Gemini 2.5 Pro1M
- Gemini 2.0 Flash1M
- Llama 4 Maverick1M
Compare With
Open Source: Licensed under Modified MIT
Not on our gateway yet
Kimi K3 is open-weight, so you can run it yourself. Swfte Connect turns your deployment into a managed endpoint that speaks the same API as every other model in this directory.
curl https://api.swfte.com/agents/v2/gateway/chat/completions \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $SWFTE_API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{
"model": "moonshot:kimi-k3",
"messages": [{"role": "user", "content": "Hello"}]
}'About Kimi K3
Kimi K3 is a flagship AI model by Moonshot AI, released on July 16, 2026. It supports a context window of 1049K tokens and can generate up to 33K output tokens.
At $3 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens, its blended cost of $9.00/1M tokens places it in the premium pricing tier. Its value score of 10.8 reflects the balance of quality and cost.
Kimi K3 is available as an open-source model under the Modified MIT license, meaning you can self-host it for predictable costs or use it through API providers like Swfte Connect.
Using Kimi K3 with Swfte
Access Kimi K3 through Swfte Connect, our unified LLM gateway. Connect gives you a single API for 50+ models, with automatic routing, cost optimization, and fallback handling. You can also try Kimi K3 in our AI Playground before integrating.