Kimi K3 Matches US Frontier AI at 70% Less Cost

Beijing-based Moonshot AI released Kimi K3, a 2.8-trillion-parameter open-weight multimodal reasoning model, on July 16, 2026. The model matches American frontier LLMs at 70% lower cost, scoring 57 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v4.1 behind Claude Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol. Kimi K3 won first place in four of eight real-world automation benchmarks.