Kimi K3
Moonshot flagship. API unlocked after a minimum $1 top-up. Chat Completions, Responses and Anthropic-compatible Messages supported. Max output and knowledge cutoff not verified. Docs moved to platform.kimi.ai (platform.moonshot.ai still serves).
- Context window
- 1,048,576 tokens
- Input
- text, image, video
- Output
- text
- License
- kimi-k3 (custom)
- Pricing
- input: $3 · output: $15 · cache read: $0.3 · cache write 5m: $3 · cache write 1h: $6 (per 1M tokens (USD)) source
- Verified
- 2026-09-29
How to call it
| Provider | Model id | Endpoint / URL | Docs |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kimi API (Moonshot) | kimi-k3 | https://api.moonshot.ai/v1 | docs |
| Alibaba Cloud Model Studio | kimi-k3 | — | docs |
| OpenRouter | moonshotai/kimi-k3 | openrouter.ai/moonshotai/kimi-k3 | — |
| Hugging Face | — | huggingface.co/moonshotai/Kimi-K3 | — |
| Web app | — | www.kimi.com | — |
Notable capabilities (4)
- FIRST First open 3T-class model: 2.8T-parameter MoE (16 of 896 experts active) - Moonshot's claim: the first open model at this scale; weights released after launch (promised by 2026-07-27). source
- Kimi Delta Attention + Attention Residuals: Hybrid linear attention (KDA) and AttnRes; ~2.5x the scaling efficiency of K2 per Moonshot. source
- Native vision with 1M context: Native visual understanding (image and video) and a 1,048,576-token window; strong at coding tasks that use screenshots/visual feedback (games, frontend, CAD). source
- Always-on thinking with effort control: Thinking cannot be disabled; reasoning_effort low/high/max (default max). source
Moonshot's frontier open model for long-horizon coding, knowledge work and deep reasoning; 1M context, vision.
curl https://api.moonshot.ai/v1/chat/completions \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $MOONSHOT_API_KEY" -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"model":"kimi-k3","reasoning_effort":"high","messages":[{"role":"user","content":"Hello"}]}'
Sources: https://platform.kimi.ai/docs/guide/kimi-k3-quickstart · https://platform.kimi.ai/docs/pricing/chat · https://platform.kimi.ai/docs/models · https://www.kimi.com/blog/kimi-k3