Moonshot AI releases weights for Kimi-K3, firing a shot across the bow of OpenAI and Anthropic — open-weight model performs almost as well as frontier models while being 2-3x easier to run

Moonshot AI released the weights for Kimi K3, letting users run and commercialize it on their own hardware.

The company says Kimi K3 lands close to top proprietary frontier models on benchmarks.

It uses less VRAM and is cheaper to infer, helped by low-precision formats, sparse expert activation, and fixed-size attention state.

The release puts a near-frontier open-weight model in more hands and raises pressure on closed AI leaders.