8 models · on the curve since 2023
Moonshot AI
Moonshot’s models are open and frontier-adjacent, which is the fastest-commoditising place to stand. The durable bet is Kimi as a consumer habit in China and the agentic, long-context niche it reached first.
What would change this readKimi loses its consumer foothold to a better-distributed rival, or its open weights fall off the frontier pace.
- Recent cadence
- 5 in last 12 mo
- 2 the year before
- Landmark density
- 4 / 8
- defining releases
- Weights
- Open weights
- Kimi K3 flagship
Trains and serves on
No silicon and no datacentre of its own. Bloomberg reported in July 2026 that Moonshot has access to roughly 20,000 NVIDIA Hopper-generation chips supplied by Alibaba, said to be a key part of the compute behind the Kimi models; an Alibaba spokesperson called that account "completely groundless" and Reuters could not confirm it. What is confirmed is serving, not training: Kimi K3 got day-zero hosting on Alibaba Cloud and day-zero support from Huawei.
ConcentrationIts reported training compute is rented from Alibaba, which is at the same time its largest outside shareholder and the vendor of a directly competing model — and which denies the arrangement.
Flagship, per million tokens
$3.00 in $15.00 out
Kimi K3, cache-miss input
Was
$2.00 / $5.00
moonshot-v1-128k, legacy tier at current list
- Weights
- Full weights, but not an open-source licence — a distinction usually reported wrong. Kimi K3 ships its complete 2.8T-parameter weights under a bespoke Kimi K3 Licence that requires a separate agreement above $20M of model-as-a-service revenue and attribution above 100M monthly users. Moonshot itself says "open weight", never "open source".
- Where you buy it
- Own API and kimi.com · HuggingFace · Alibaba Cloud Model Studio · Fireworks AI · Together AI · OpenRouter
- Structure
- Beijing Moonshot AI Technology, private, founded 2023 out of Tsinghua. It told investors in May 2026 it would dismantle its offshore red-chip and VIE structure to win approval for a Hong Kong listing, following regulator guidance.
- Raised
- About $3.5B at a $35B valuation, closed July 2026; no reliable cumulative total exists in public sources
- Valuation
- About US$35B (Jul 2026, reported); talks for a pre-IPO round at a higher figure were reported days earlier
- Revenue
- Not disclosed. Reported run-rate above $200M (Apr 2026), with API licensing said to be the large majority
Biggest single dependencyAlibaba is simultaneously its largest outside shareholder, its reported compute supplier and its most direct competitor — and publicly denies the supply arrangement.
The legacy price shown is that tier's CURRENT list price, not a dated 2024 figure: Moonshot's legacy pricing page carries no effective date, so no clean two-year comparison is possible. On the figures that do exist, Kimi K3 is the most expensive flagship on this site and the price has moved up, not down. Headcount is omitted because reported figures range from 80 to 300 and are plainly counting different things.
Hover any point to read the release. The y-axis is qualitative; only the x-axis carries dates.
- Long context
- Reach for Kimi when the task needs very long context (128K at launch, Oct 2023).
- Open agentic
- Pick K2 Thinking for open reasoning and agentic work (Nov 2025).
- Trillion-scale open
- Use Kimi K2 where you want a 1T open MoE you can host (Jul 2025).
- Jul 2026 Kimi K3 Latest 2.8T-parameter MoE with 1M context — the largest open-weight release to date, though under a bespoke licence rather than an open-source one
- Nov 2025 Kimi K2 Thinking Open reasoning and agentic model
- Jul 2025 Kimi K2 Trillion-parameter MoE, open-sourced
- Oct 2023 Kimi (chatbot) Long-context assistant launch
Full release logall 8, newest first
- 2026
- Jul Kimi K3 ◆ 2.8T-parameter MoE with 1M context — the largest open-weight release to date, though under a bespoke licence rather than an open-source one
- Apr Kimi K2.6 Agentic coding, general availability
- Jan Kimi K2.5 Multimodal update
- 2025
- Nov Kimi K2 Thinking ◆ Open reasoning and agentic model
- Sep Kimi K2 Instruct 0905 Longer context, stronger coding
- Jul Kimi K2 ◆ Trillion-parameter MoE, open-sourced
- Jan Kimi K1.5 Reasoning model matching o1
- 2023
- Oct Kimi (chatbot) ◆ Long-context assistant launch
- Founded
- 2023
- HQ
- Beijing, China
- Leadership
- Yang Zhilin (CEO)
- Backers
- Alibaba, Tencent
- Flagship
- Kimi K3
- Weights
- Open weights, bespoke licence
- Also builds
- Kimi assistant
- Known for
- Long-context, Kimi
Founded March 2023 by Tsinghua schoolmates Yang Zhilin and others, headquartered in Beijing. Known for the Kimi assistant — an early long-context leader — and the open-weight Kimi K2 series of trillion-parameter agentic models.