Kimi K3 Release Date: Launched July 16, 2026

Kimi K3 was officially released on July 16, 2026. Moonshot AI announced its 2.8-trillion-parameter flagship with a full launch — model live in the Kimi app, API access, the Kimi Work desktop app, and the Kimi Code CLI all available on day one.

Kimi K3 release timeline

Date	Milestone
July 16, 2026	Kimi K3 officially launched — live in Kimi app, kimi.com, API, Kimi Work, and Kimi Code
July 16, 2026	Official benchmark suite published on Moonshot’s blog
July 19, 2026	Independent rankings land: #4 of 189 models on Artificial Analysis (score 57, on the index version used at the time)
July 27, 2026	Open weights released on Hugging Face (moonshotai/Kimi-K3) under the custom Kimi K3 License
August 6, 2026	Kimi K3 generally available in GitHub Copilot
September 11, 2026	K2.8 Preview takes over the kimi-for-coding model in Kimi Code
September 18, 2026	Kimi plans relaunched as Go / Plus / Pro / Max; K3 generally available on Amazon Bedrock

What was available at launch

Unlike many AI launches that trickle out access over weeks, K3’s release was wide from day one:

• Kimi app & kimi.com — iOS, Android, HarmonyOS and web (the app has a free tier, but Moonshot’s docs now list K3 access only on paid plans)
• Kimi Work — the PC desktop app for Windows and Apple silicon
• Kimi API — kimi-k3 live on platform.moonshot.ai with OpenAI-compatible endpoints (the platform has since moved to platform.kimi.ai; the base URL is still api.moonshot.ai/v1)
• Kimi Code — terminal/IDE agent with K3 selectable via /model

The pre-launch rumors: what was right?

In the weeks before launch, “Kimi K3 release date” and even “Kimi K3 release odds” were trending searches as leaks circulated. Here’s how the rumor mill scored:

Correct:

• A mid-July 2026 launch window ✓
• A trillion-parameter-scale MoE architecture ✓
• Open weights following shortly after launch ✓

Wrong (or undersold):

• Most leaks predicted ~1.5T parameters — the real model is 2.8T
• Few predicted the 1M-token context window with 6.3× faster long-context decoding
• Nobody had the Kimi Delta Attention + Attention Residuals architecture on their bingo card

The lesson: Moonshot kept the genuinely important details — the architecture — completely quiet until launch day.

What came after release

The biggest post-launch date was July 27, 2026, when K3’s weights went public on Hugging Face under the custom Kimi K3 License (what the open-weights release includes). That made K3 the largest open-weight model released to date — nearly 3× the size of K2’s 1.0T. Quantizations followed: Unsloth now publishes K3 GGUFs from about 466GB up to 1.56TB.

Since then, distribution has kept widening: K3 landed in GitHub Copilot on August 6, Moonshot relaunched its Kimi plans as Go / Plus / Pro / Max on September 18 (K3 in Kimi Code starts at Plus), and Amazon Bedrock made K3 generally available the same day at the same $3 / $15 per million token list price. See every place you can use Kimi K3 for the current provider list.

On independent rankings, Artificial Analysis has since re-versioned its Intelligence Index. On v4.3.2, K3 scores 44 and ranks #3 of 115 large (over 150B) open-weight models; that number is not comparable with the July score of 57.

For full technical details on what launched, see Kimi K3 specifications explained, or start from the complete Kimi K3 guide.

FAQ

Is Kimi K3 out now? Yes. It launched July 16, 2026 in the Kimi app, on kimi.com, via the API, in Kimi Work and in Kimi Code. The Kimi app has a free tier, but Moonshot’s docs list K3 access only on paid plans (Plus and above since September 18, 2026), and the API unlocks after a $1 top-up. K3 is also on GitHub Copilot (since August 6) and generally available on Amazon Bedrock (since September 18).

When did Kimi K3 open weights come out? On July 27, 2026, on Hugging Face (moonshotai/Kimi-K3), under the custom Kimi K3 License rather than the modified MIT license used for K2. Commercial use, fine-tuning and redistribution are allowed; Model-as-a-Service businesses with more than $20M revenue over any 12 months need a separate agreement with Moonshot.

Was there a Kimi K3 release delay? No — K3 shipped inside the mid-July window that had been rumored, with all four access channels live on day one.

Is “Kimi 3.0” the same as Kimi K3? Yes — “Kimi 3.0” is just the popular search term. The official name is Kimi K3.