Moonshot AI releases 2.8T parameter Kimi K3, pricing at $3/$15 per million tokens

Chinese AI lab Moonshot AI released Kimi K3, a 2.8 trillion parameter model priced at $3 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens. The model is currently available via API, with open weights promised by July 27, 2026.

Model specifications and pricing

Kimi K3 represents a significant scale increase from Moonshot's previous model, K2.6, which had 1 trillion parameters and was priced at $0.95 input/$4 output per million tokens. Moonshot claims K3 is their "most capable model to date" and describes it as the first "open 3T-class model," surpassing DeepSeek's 1.6T parameter v4 Pro.

The $3/$15 pricing matches Anthropic's Claude Sonnet series and makes K3 the most expensive model released by a Chinese AI lab. This represents more than a 3x price increase over K2.6.

Benchmark performance

According to Moonshot's self-reported benchmarks, K3 beats Claude Opus 4.8 max and GPT-5.5 high on most tasks, while trailing Claude Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol. Third-party evaluator Artificial Analysis reports K3 achieved an Elo of 1547 on their private long-horizon knowledge work evaluation, placing it behind only Claude Fable 5. The model now leads Arena.ai's Frontend Code arena, surpassing Claude Fable 5.

Artificial Analysis reports K3's cost per task at $0.94, similar to GPT-5.6 Sol ($1.04), roughly half the price of Opus 4.8 ($1.80), though higher than open weight alternatives. The model uses 21% fewer output tokens than K2.6 according to the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index.

Reasoning token usage

K3 currently offers only one reasoning effort level ("max"), which shows significant token consumption. A simple SVG generation prompt consumed 13,241 reasoning tokens to output 3,417 tokens of response, costing approximately $0.25 for that single request. The same prompt counted as 95 input tokens despite being only 10 words, suggesting an 85-token hidden system prompt.

The model includes vision capabilities, demonstrating strong performance on image description tasks.

What this means

Kimi K3's pricing strategy marks a shift for Chinese AI labs toward premium pricing tiers, matching Western competitors like Anthropic. The aggressive pricing suggests confidence in the model's capabilities, though the high reasoning token consumption at the "max" effort level could make practical applications expensive. The promised open weights release by July 27, 2026, will be significant given the model's 2.8T parameter size—making it the largest openly available model if released as planned. The model's strong performance on coding benchmarks and third-party evaluations suggests Chinese labs continue closing the gap with frontier Western models, though head-to-head comparisons remain challenging without standardized benchmarks.