Kimi K3 has not been released. As of July 16, 2026, Moonshot AI has published no model card, no benchmarks and no weights — but it did post an official K3 teaser on July 15, an anonymous model called "Kivine" that testers attribute to Moonshot has been running on Arena, and the Financial Times reports a 2-to-3-trillion-parameter model landing "in the coming days." The community's revised bet is a launch around July 17–20, timed to the WAIC conference. This page separates what is confirmed from what is only leak noise, and we will update it when the model ships.
Confirmed, reported, rumored — the three piles
A release-eve story like this one is mostly noise, so it helps to sort every claim by how much weight it can bear.
Confirmed (primary sources):
- Moonshot posted an official K3 teaser video on July 15, 2026. That is the company acknowledging the name — and nothing more.
- An anonymous model called Kivine has been appearing on Arena, where testers caught it in side-by-side generations against frontier models. Attribution to Moonshot is community consensus, not an official statement.
- A "K3 launch top-up promotion" page briefly appeared on Kimi's Open Platform dated to start July 15, then was deleted. The date passed without a release.
- The current shipping flagship is Kimi K2.6, with the coding-focused K2.7-code alongside it. Moonshot's own properties still headline K2.6 as of July 16.
Reported (named outlets, unconfirmed by Moonshot):
- The Financial Times puts K3 at 2 to 3 trillion parameters, which would make it the largest open-weight model from China, with release expected within days.
- TechCrunch frames K3 as Moonshot's attempt to close the gap with Claude Opus 4.8.
Rumored (community leaks, treat as noise until a datasheet exists):
- A ~2.5T-parameter MoE architecture with a 1M-token context window.
- Coding claims all over the map — "Opus-class on some evals, behind GPT-5.6 Sol and Fable 5 on Terminal-Bench" is a representative leak, and exactly the kind of number that changes once real benchmarks land.
- Viral Arena clips: single-prompt Minecraft-style web games and elaborate scene generations that testers scored above same-tier rivals. Impressive if genuine, unverifiable by design — Arena prompts are cherry-picked by whoever posts them.
Why K3 matters, whatever the specs turn out to be
Moonshot has shipped every K-series flagship as open weights, so the default expectation — not guaranteed, but likely — is that K3 arrives the same way. If the FT's parameter reporting is right, that means the largest open-weight model ever released, from the lab whose K2.6 already anchors the long-context agent tier of the Chinese lineup.
The strategic context makes the timing legible. July 2026 has been a release pile-up: GPT-5.6 went GA on July 9 with its three-tier pricing, GLM-5.2 sits at the top of the open-weight coding charts, and WAIC — China's flagship AI conference — runs the week of July 17. A K3 launch inside that window would be Moonshot reclaiming the spotlight in the most crowded month the model market has had.
For a sense of where the bar sits today, our Chinese model rankings and the GLM-5.2 deep dive cover the current leaders K3 has to beat.
What you can run today (and what changes at launch)
The models K3 will supersede are available now, behind one OpenAI-compatible key on Turiloop:
- kimi-k2.6 — the current Moonshot flagship: strong long-context agent work at $0.95 input / $4.00 output per million tokens, with cached input at $0.16.
- kimi-k2.7-code — the coding-tuned variant, for editor agents and repo work.
When K3's API opens, the switch will be a model-id change, not a migration — that is the point of an OpenAI-compatible gateway. We list models the day their APIs stabilize, and this page will get the real specs, prices and benchmarks when they exist. The pricing calculator will pick up K3 the same day.
FAQ
When is Kimi K3 coming out? Unannounced. As of July 16, 2026 the strongest signals — an official teaser on July 15 and a deleted launch-promotion page — point to imminent release, with community expectations centered on July 17–20 during WAIC. Moonshot has committed to no date publicly.
What is Kivine on Arena? An anonymous model that testers widely attribute to Moonshot and believe to be a K3 test build. The attribution fits the teaser timing but has not been confirmed.
What are Kimi K3's specs? Nothing is official. Leaks claim a roughly 2.5T-parameter MoE with a 1M-token context; the FT reports 2–3T parameters. Until a model card exists, treat every number as provisional.
Will Kimi K3 be open weights? Unconfirmed. Every prior K-series flagship (K2, K2.6) shipped open weights, so the precedent says yes — but Moonshot has not stated it.
What should I use while waiting? Kimi K2.6 for long-context agent work, or GLM-5.2 if coding is the priority. Both run through one OpenAI-compatible key on Turiloop, so trying K3 at launch will be a one-line change.