China’s Kimi K3 Is Out—And Beats Claude Fable and GPT 5.6 Sol on Key Benchmarks - Decrypt

In brief

Moonshot AI released Kimi K3 on July 16—a 2.8-trillion-parameter open-weight model that beats US labs on specific specialized benchmarks.

K3 is priced identically to Claude Sonnet 5 ($3 per million input tokens, $15 per million output tokens) while scoring closer to Fable 5.

Full model weights—the files that let anyone run, fine-tune, or build on the model locally—drop by July 27 under a modified MIT license, making K3 the largest freely available AI model in history.

Moonshot AI just put out the biggest Chinese open-source model ever released, and it topped Claude Fable 5 at writing scripts.Towards AI's Writing Elo—a benchmark where models write real scripts judged blind against published versions, scored using the same Elo system that ranks chess players—put Kimi K3 at 2,840, above Fable 5 (max) at 2,760. That's a ranking Anthropic's team has historically dominated.