Meet China's Kimi K3! The largest open-weight AI model in history drops tonight
&imwidth=600&imheight=450&format=webp&quality=medium "Meet China's Kimi K3! The largest open-weight AI model in history drops tonight")
Meet China's Kimi K3! The largest open-weight AI model in history drops tonight
Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 releases its full model weights at 00:00 UTC on July 27 — a 2.8-trillion-parameter model, roughly 1.4 terabytes using MXFP4 quantization, making it the largest open-weight AI release in history. The release comes days after the White House publicly accused Moonshot of distilling Anthropic's Fable model to build it.
The largest open-weight AI model ever built goes fully public tonight — and it arrives already at the centre of a US-China technology dispute.
The Release
Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 releases its complete model weights at 00:00 UTC on July 27, which lands in the evening of July 26 across US time zones. The model has 2.8 trillion parameters, and the full weights come in at roughly 1.4 terabytes using MXFP4 quantization — a compression format that reduces file size while preserving most of the model's performance. By total parameter count and release size, it is the largest open-weight model ever made publicly available.
Unlike a closed, API-only release, open-weighting a model of this scale means any developer, company, or government with sufficient hardware can download, run, modify, and build on Kimi K3 directly — no permission from Moonshot required, and no ongoing dependency on Moonshot's own servers.
Landing In The Middle Of A Distillation Dispute
The timing is not incidental to the controversy already surrounding the model. On July 22, White House science and technology policy director Michael Kratsios publicly accused Moonshot of covertly distilling Anthropic's Fable model to build Kimi K3 — the first time a senior US official has named a specific Chinese lab for allegedly copying a specific American model. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent followed with a warning that sanctions and Entity List designations were ‘on the table.’
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Tonight's full weight release cuts against the timeline of that accusation in one respect: independent AI researchers have already noted that Anthropic's Fable model only became publicly available on July 1, making it difficult for an industrial-scale distillation effort to have been the primary driver of a model this large, this fast. Whether or not the distillation claim holds up, the release itself gives outside researchers their first real opportunity to examine Kimi K3's architecture directly rather than relying on API behaviour alone.
Why The Scale Matters Beyond The Politics
Kimi K3 lands in the middle of what's already the steepest AI price collapse the industry has seen — OpenAI's GPT-5.6 starting at $1 per million tokens, Meta's Muse Spark 1.1 at $1.25/$4.25, and Kimi K3 itself running as low as $0.30 per million tokens on cached input even before tonight's open-weight release removes the API paywall for anyone able to self-host it.
A 2.8-trillion-parameter model of this capability, available for free download rather than gated behind a metered API, changes the competitive calculus for every lab currently charging for access to comparable capability — including the labs, like Anthropic and OpenAI, that Kimi K3 is now accused of having learned from.
