Moonshot AI released the full weights of Kimi K3 on Monday, putting a 2.8-trillion-parameter model into public hands and, per Bloomberg, making it the largest openly downloadable system to date. The Beijing startup describes the release as the first open model at the three-trillion-parameter scale, with developers free to download, adapt and self-host without restriction.

The architecture is a mixture-of-experts design with 896 experts, 16 activated per inference, and a one-million-token context window. A separate technical report on training and evaluations is expected in the coming weeks.

Founder Yang Zhilin told Bloomberg the company intends to grow its user base by prioritising openness over a proprietary approach. That framing lands with force in the market. After the K3 debut last week, Z.ai fell as much as 30 percent in Hong Kong trading, MiniMax Group dropped as much as 16 percent, and Alibaba declined 4 percent. Chinese labs that had positioned themselves upstream of Moonshot now find their moats redrawn overnight.

Moonshot’s own trajectory explains why openness reads as offense rather than charity. Daily revenue has grown at least sixfold since launch, annual recurring revenue climbed from $200 million in April to $300 million in June, and the company is reportedly seeking a new funding round at a $50 billion valuation ahead of a potential Hong Kong IPO as soon as this year. Free weights are the customer-acquisition engine underneath the listing pitch.

Washington is watching. Last week Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, accused Moonshot of training K3 on restricted Nvidia chips and distilling competing frontier models, including Anthropic’s Fable. Moonshot hasn’t responded to requests for comment.

The 2019 Huawei-era playbook is being run in reverse: the export-controlled firm ships the artifact for free, and the burden of narrative shifts onto the regulator.

Sources