moonshotai/Kimi-K3
Simon Willison Simon Willison ● Covered by 23 sources
Moonshot AI released the weights for Kimi K3, a 2.8 trillion parameter model, totaling 1.56TB on Hugging Face. The model's license requires a separate commercial agreement with Moonshot for any Model as a Service business exceeding $20 million in annual revenue. Kimi avoids calling this "open source," instead using "open weight," and OpenRouter is already offering K3 from multiple providers at comparable pricing to Moonshot's official rates.
Why it matters
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 large "Model as a Service" businesses: If the Licensee or any of its affiliates operates a Model as a Service business, and t
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