TLDR
- Moonshot AI is releasing Kimi K3’s weights for free public download on Monday, July 27
- Kimi K3 has 2.8 trillion parameters, making it the world’s largest open-weight AI model
- Daily sales at Moonshot surged sixfold after K3’s debut earlier this month
- A White House official accused Moonshot of training K3 on banned Nvidia chips
- Moonshot is seeking a new funding round valuing the company at $50 billion ahead of a potential Hong Kong IPO
Moonshot AI is releasing its Kimi K3 model for free public download, letting developers fine-tune and run the technology locally at no cost.
Moonshot AI is poised to make its Kimi K3 model available for public download, expanding its reach in the global open software community at a time of growing US concern about Chinese encroachment into the top echelons of AI development https://t.co/zIOoU0lXoR
— Bloomberg (@business) July 27, 2026
The Beijing-based startup is making the model’s weights available on Monday. This allows developers to download, modify, and host the AI system themselves.
Kimi K3 is the world’s largest open-weight AI model, built with 2.8 trillion parameters. Parameters are a rough measure of an AI model’s complexity.
The model features a 1-million-token context window. That means it can process large documents or entire codebases in a single prompt.
Moonshot says K3 performs competitively with OpenAI’s Fable 5 and outperforms Anthropic’s Opus model, as well as several GPT-5 variants, across a range of benchmarks.
Chinese AI Gaining Ground
K3’s launch drew comparisons to DeepSeek’s release in early 2025. Both showed that Chinese companies can build competitive AI models with fewer resources and at lower cost than US rivals.
Chinese AI models have grown in global popularity by offering cheaper rates with comparable performance. Major cloud platforms including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Vertex AI have not yet added support for these Chinese open-weight models.
Bloomberg Intelligence analysts noted that open-weight model adoption is rising, but making money from them will depend on distribution through large cloud providers.
Funding, IPO Plans, and US Scrutiny
Daily sales at Moonshot jumped at least sixfold after K3 launched. The startup temporarily paused new subscriptions due to the surge in demand.
Moonshot hit a $20 billion valuation in May after a $2 billion funding round led by Meituan’s venture arm Long-Z Investments. It is now seeking a new round that could value the three-year-old company at $50 billion.
A Hong Kong IPO could come as early as this year. Moonshot founder Yang Zhilin has said the company wants to grow by prioritising openness over proprietary systems.
The company has attracted US attention. A White House official last week accused Moonshot of training K3 on banned Nvidia chips and using distillation — a practice of extracting outputs from rival models to improve its own.
Moonshot has not responded to those allegations.
A technical report covering K3’s architecture, training methods, and benchmark results is expected to be released alongside the model download.
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