What Happened
Moonshot launched Kimi K3 in its applications and API on July 16, 2026, as dated by its official research index. The initial announcement promised weights for July 27. A separate official post on July 27 confirms their actual release, alongside the technical report and infrastructure projects.
Why It Matters
K3 pushed downloadable model development into a substantially larger parameter regime while introducing changes intended to improve scaling across sequence length and network depth. Publishing both weights and supporting infrastructure gave outside researchers access to more of that technical stack.
Technical Details
The 2.8-trillion-parameter mixture-of-experts model supports native vision and a one-million-token context. It combines Kimi Delta Attention, Attention Residuals and Stable LatentMoE, selecting 16 of 896 experts. The July 27 release includes MoonEP and AgentEnv. Model use is governed by the Kimi K3 license; weight availability should not be conflated with unrestricted open-source licensing.