# Moonshot releases Kimi K3, 2.8T parameter open-weight model matching frontier capability

> Moonshot has released Kimi K3, a 2.8 trillion parameter mixture-of-experts model with a one-million-token context window and reasoning switched on by default rather than split into a separate variant. The company says K3 outperforms Claude Opus 4.8 max and GPT-5.5 high on benchmarks while pricing access at 3 dollars per million input tokens and 15 dollars per million output, matching Claude Sonnet. The full open weights are due to drop by July 27. What makes this notable is not just the benchmark bragging but the combination of frontier-level claims with an open-weight release. If the numbers hold up, a freely downloadable Chinese model would be trading blows with the most expensive closed systems from US labs, and at a fraction of the cost. That pattern, capable open models undercutting the frontier on price, is exactly what has been pulling cost-sensitive workloads away from OpenAI and Anthropic, and K3 turns up the pressure another notch.

_Section: [Daily AI Updates](https://www.wortins.com/daily-ai) · Source: TechCrunch · Published Saturday, July 18, 2026_

## Wortins' read

Moonshot has released Kimi K3, a 2.8 trillion parameter mixture-of-experts model with a one-million-token context window and reasoning switched on by default rather than split into a separate variant. The company says K3 outperforms Claude Opus 4.8 max and GPT-5.5 high on benchmarks while pricing access at 3 dollars per million input tokens and 15 dollars per million output, matching Claude Sonnet. The full open weights are due to drop by July 27. What makes this notable is not just the benchmark bragging but the combination of frontier-level claims with an open-weight release. If the numbers hold up, a freely downloadable Chinese model would be trading blows with the most expensive closed systems from US labs, and at a fraction of the cost. That pattern, capable open models undercutting the frontier on price, is exactly what has been pulling cost-sensitive workloads away from OpenAI and Anthropic, and K3 turns up the pressure another notch.

## Source

[Read the full story at TechCrunch](https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/16/moonshots-upcoming-kimi-3-is-expected-to-close-the-gap-with-anthropics-opus-4-8/)

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