Kimi is Moonshot AI's assistant and open-weight model family (the K2 line), built as a trillion-parameter mixture-of-experts that activates a fraction of its weights per token. It punches at the frontier on agentic tool use and coding while pricing far below Western closed labs, and the open weights let teams self-host or fine-tune for full data control.
LLMs & AssistantsOpen SourceEstablishedFrom Free chat / from $0.60 per 1M tokens (API)
＋Frontier-class agentic coding — K2.7-Code leads Opus 4.8 on MCP-Mark Verified
＋Trillion-parameter MoE with open weights for self-hosting and fine-tuning
＋256K context and API pricing that undercuts most closed competitors many times over
Limitations
－China-based hosting raises data-residency and compliance questions for regulated buyers
－Trails the very top on some pure-reasoning benchmarks (GPQA-Diamond, AIME) versus GPT-5.4
－English-language ecosystem, docs and enterprise support thinner than US labs
Evidence behind this score
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1 of 3 claims below are past their re-check window. Pricing, availability and security details move fast, so confirm those with the vendor.
Claim
Source
Checked
Kimi K2.6 priced at $0.60 input / $2.50 output per 1M tokens on the official API· re-check
OpenRouter / Moonshot pricing
Jun 2026
K2.7-Code (1T total / 32B active MoE, 256K context) beats Opus 4.8 on MCP-Mark Verified, 81.1 vs 76.4
OpenRouter model card & MarkTechPost
Jun 2026
K2.6 trails GPT-5.4 on GPQA-Diamond (90.5% vs 92.8%) and AIME 2026 (96.4% vs 99.2%)
llm-stats.com benchmarks
Jun 2026
Intelligence on Kimi
Releasehigh impactJul 26, 2026
Kimi K3's 2.8T open weights land — the largest open model yet, if you can host it
Moonshot released the full Kimi K3 weights for free download a day ahead of its 27 July target: 2.8 trillion parameters with 104B active, a ~1M-token context window, and roughly 1.4TB of fast memory required even at four-bit MXFP4 precision, for which Moonshot recommends at least 64 accelerators. Together AI and Modal had day-0 hosting. Near-frontier coding quality is now self-hostable, which removes the objection for anyone who was blocked on sending data to a Chinese API.
KimiMoonshot AI release on Hugging Face; Quartz and TechTimes coverage
Releasehigh impactJul 16, 2026
Moonshot's Kimi K3 pushes open weights into 3T-parameter territory
Kimi K3 is a 2.8 trillion-parameter mixture-of-experts that trails only the newest Claude and GPT flagships on benchmarks while undercutting them sharply on price, with open weights promised days after launch. For anyone weighing self-hosting against an API bill, the gap that made that choice easy is narrowing.
Kimi K2.7 Code becomes first open-weight model in Copilot's picker
GitHub added Moonshot's Kimi K2.7 Code to Copilot's model picker — the first open-weight model offered there. Copilot's model line-up now spans OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and open weights. That is a cheaper agentic-coding option inside a tool most teams already have.
Moonshot's Kimi K2.7-Code beats Opus 4.8 on agentic coding at open-weight prices
Moonshot AI's K2 line — a trillion-parameter mixture-of-experts with 256K context and open weights — is rattling the coding-model market: K2.7-Code leads Opus 4.8 on MCP-Mark Verified (81.1 vs 76.4) while the API prices from $0.60 per 1M tokens. A strong option for cost-sensitive and self-hosted agentic coding, with data-residency caveats for regulated buyers.