moonshotai/Kimi-K3
Simon Willison · Simon Willison · 2026-07-27
Moonshot AI releases the weights for Kimi K3, a 2.8 trillion parameter model at 1.56TB, under a new license that requires large Model-as-a-Service businesses to negotiate a separate commercial agreement, with the model already available from seven providers on OpenRouter.
Appears in
Extraction
Topics: open-weight-modelsllm-releaseai-licensingmoonshot-aikimi-k3
Claims
- Moonshot AI has released Kimi K3 weights publicly on Hugging Face at 1.56TB, following through on an earlier commitment.
- The K3 license is more restrictive than K2's modified MIT license, requiring any Model-as-a-Service business exceeding $20 million in annual revenue to enter a separate agreement with Moonshot AI before commercial use.
- Moonshot AI consistently uses the term 'open weight' rather than 'open source' for Kimi K3, accurately reflecting the license's restrictions.
- Kimi K3 is already available from seven providers on OpenRouter at the same pricing as Moonshot AI directly: $3 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens.
Key quotes
To Kimi's credit, they make no attempt to describe this as an 'open source' license in their own materials, consistently using the term 'open weight' in its place.
If the Licensee or any of its affiliates operates a Model as a Service business, and the aggregate revenue of the Licensee and its affiliates exceeds 20 million US dollars (or the equivalent in other currencies) in total over any consecutive 12 months, the Licensee must enter into a separate agreement with Moonshot AI before using the Software or its derivative works for any commercial purpose.