Beijing-based artificial intelligence startup Moonshot AI released Kimi K3 this week, unveiling what the company describes as the largest open-source AI model ever made publicly available, with benchmark performance the company says rivals some of the most advanced systems built by American labs including Anthropic and OpenAI.

The model, released Thursday, contains 2.8 trillion total parameters, making it roughly 75% larger than DeepSeek's V4 Pro, previously one of the largest Chinese open-weight models at approximately 1.6 trillion parameters, and far outpacing Zhipu AI's GLM 5 series at 744 billion parameters. Kimi K3 is also roughly 2.8 times the size of Moonshot's previous flagship model, K2.6, released in April. Full model weights are scheduled to be released publicly on July 27, timed to coincide with the 2026 World Artificial Intelligence Conference currently underway in Shanghai.

According to Moonshot, K3 performed "competitively" against Anthropic's Fable 5, currently among the most capable publicly available AI models, and "substantially outperformed" Anthropic's Opus 4.8 as well as OpenAI's GPT 5.6 Sol and GPT 5.5 on the company's officially released benchmarks, where K3 consistently ranked among the top three models tested. One independent benchmark from Arena.AI reportedly ranked K3 as the best-performing model currently available, ahead of offerings from both Anthropic and OpenAI, though Moonshot's own reporting placed K3 slightly behind Fable 5 on overall performance.

In a press release announcing the model, Moonshot described K3 as its most powerful open-source coding model to date.........

© International Business Times