moonshotai/Kimi-K3
Moonshot AI has released the weights for its 2.8 trillion parameter Kimi K3 model, a hefty 1.56TB on Hugging Face. The K3 license no longer calls itself 'modified MIT' and requires a separate agreement for larger companies. OpenRouter already offers K3 from 7 providers at the same pricing as Moonshot itself.
moonshotai/Kimi-K3
Simon Willison’s Weblog
Subscribe
27th July 2026 - Link Blog
moonshotai/Kimi-K3. As promised earlier this month, Moonshot have released the weights for their excellent 2.8 trillion parameter Kimi K3. They're a hefty 1.56TB on Hugging Face.
Kimi introduced their own janky modified version of the MIT license with K2 back in July 2025. That license just added this paragraph requiring attribution beyond a certain size of commercial entity:
Our only modification part is that, if the Software (or any derivative works thereof) is used for any of your commercial products or services that have more than 100 million monthly active users, or more than 20 million US dollars (or equivalent in other currencies) in monthly revenue, you shall prominently display "Kimi K2" on the user interface of such product or service.
The K3 license no longer calls itself "modified MIT" and goes further, requiring a separate agreement with Moonshot for those larger companies:
If the Licensee or any of its affiliates operates a Model as a Service business, and the aggregate revenue of the Licensee and its affiliates exceeds 20 million US dollars (or the equivalent in other currencies) in total over any consecutive 12 months, the Licensee must enter into a separate agreement with Moonshot AI before using the Software or its derivative works for any commercial purpose.
To Kimi's credit, they make no attempt to describe this as an "open source" license in their own materials, consistently using the term "open weight" in its place.
OpenRouter is already offering K3 from 7 providers, most of which are at the same $3/million input and $15/million output as Moonshot AI themselves.
Recent articles
OpenAI’s accidental cyberattack against Hugging Face is science fiction that happened - 22nd July 2026
A Fireside Chat with Cat and Thariq from the Claude Code team - 21st July 2026
Kimi K3, and what we can still learn from the pelican benchmark - 16th July 2026
This is a link post by Simon Willison, posted on 27th July 2026.
ai 2,145
generative-ai 1,897
llms 1,864
llm-pricing 86
llm-release 219
ai-in-china 101
moonshot 9
kimi 13
janky-licenses 7
Monthly briefing
Sponsor me for $10/month and get a curated email digest of the month's most important LLM developments.
Pay me to send you less!
Sponsor & subscribe
Disclosures
Colophon
©
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
2016
2017
2018
2019
2020
2021
2022
2023
2024
2025
2026