The largest free AI model in history is now live! Meet Kimi K3

Moonshot AI released the largest free AI model in history at midnight UTC on July 27 — going ahead with the launch despite an explicit sanctions threat from the United States Treasury five days earlier.

What Was Released

Kimi K3's complete model weights are now publicly downloadable. At 2.8 trillion parameters, it is the largest AI model ever released as an open download, and it arrives having already topped coding leaderboards during its API-only period earlier this month.

The distinction between this and a conventional model launch matters. Most frontier models are accessible only through a metered API controlled by the company that built them. Open weights mean any developer, company, university or government with sufficient hardware can download the model, run it on their own infrastructure, modify it, and build on it — with no permission required from Moonshot and no ongoing dependency on Chinese servers.

It Shipped Under An Active Sanctions Threat

The release proceeded despite direct pressure from Washington. On July 22, White House science and technology policy director Michael Kratsios publicly accused Moonshot of conducting large-scale covert distillation of Anthropic's Fable model to build Kimi K3 — the first time a senior US official had named a specific Chinese laboratory over a specific American model. Kratsios also alleged Moonshot had accessed Nvidia GB300 servers in Thailand, hardware barred from sale to Chinese firms.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent escalated hours later: ‘Open source is not open season on American IP,’ he wrote, warning that ‘sanctions and Entity List designations will be on the table’ for large-scale distillation of American models.

Moonshot released the weights anyway, on schedule.

What The Release Actually Enables — Including Scrutiny

The open-weight release cuts in an unexpected direction on the distillation question. Until now, external researchers could only observe Kimi K3's behaviour through its API and infer what was underneath. With the full weights public, independent researchers can examine the model's architecture directly and look for the statistical fingerprints that distillation from another model tends to leave behind.

In other words, the release makes the American accusation more testable, not less. Several independent AI researchers have already questioned the original claim on timing grounds: Anthropic's Fable model only became publicly available on July 1, and Kimi K3 followed within roughly a week — a compressed window for an industrial-scale distillation operation to have been the primary driver of a 2.8-trillion-parameter system.

The Competitive Effect

A model of this scale available for free download changes the economics for every lab charging for comparable capability. Kimi K3 already undercut the market on price during its API period, running as low as $0.30 per million tokens on cached input against OpenAI's GPT-5.6 at $1 and Meta's Muse Spark 1.1 at $1.25. Now the API price is optional for anyone able to self-host.

It also lands in a month when Chinese labs briefly held six of the top ten positions on independent model leaderboards, including all of the top five. Whether or not Washington's distillation case is ultimately proven, the immediate commercial reality is that the most capable freely downloadable model in the world is now Chinese.