Chinese startup Moonshot AI has released the latest version of its Kimi AI model, further shrinking the performance gap between Chinese and U.S. models just as global businesses are increasingly questioning the cost of deploying models from Anthropic and OpenAI.
On July 16, Moonshot AI unveiled Kimi K3, the latest version of its Kimi model. It boasts 2.7 trillion parameters, making it the largest open-weight large language model available today. (Parameters refer to the weights within the LLM; more parameters generally means that models can handle more complex reasoning.) DeepSeek V4 has 1.6 trillion parameters.
“K3 stands as Moonshot AI’s most powerful open-source coding model to date,” Moonshot AI wrote in a press release announcing the model’s release. “Operating with minimal human oversight, it can sustain long engineering sessions, navigate massive repositories, and orchestrate terminal tools.”
In its release, Moonshot claimed K3 performed “competitively” with Anthropic’s Fable 5, currently the most advanced AI model widely available on the market today, and “substantially outperformed” Anthropic’s Opus 4.8, and OpenAI’s GPT 5.6 Sol and GPT 5.5. On the company’s officially released benchmarks, K3 consistenty ranks within the top three models.
