The story

Moonshot AI, a Beijing-based startup backed by Alibaba, is releasing its Kimi K3 model for public download on Monday, July 27. The model contains 2.8 trillion parameters, making it the first publicly available model in the 3-trillion-parameter range. Developers can download, modify, and host the technology freely under a Modified MIT license.

Kimi K3 was initially announced and made available through API on July 16. The model uses a mixture-of-experts architecture and supports 1 million tokens, designed for tasks like long-horizon coding and advanced knowledge work. Daily sales at Moonshot have surged at least sixfold since K3's debut, and the company is seeking a new funding round at a $50 billion valuation ahead of a potential Hong Kong IPO as soon as this year.

The release comes amid growing US concern about Chinese AI development. A White House official last week accused Moonshot of training K3 on banned Nvidia chips and revived allegations of distillation, the practice of illicitly extracting outputs from competitor models. The K3 announcement triggered a selloff in AI-related stocks this month, as it demonstrated Chinese models are closing the gap on American leaders OpenAI and Anthropic.