The largest open-weight AI model ever built is going fully public tonight arriving in the middle of an escalating US-China dispute over artificial intelligence.
Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 will release its complete model weights at 00:00 UTC on July 27, corresponding to the evening of July 26 across US time zones. The model carries 2.8 trillion parameters, with its full weights totalling roughly 1.4 terabytes using MXFP4 quantisation, a compression format that shrinks file size while preserving most of the model’s performance. By both parameter count and release size, it stands as the largest open-weight model ever made publicly available.
Unlike a closed, API-only release, open-weighting a model of this scale means any developer, company, or government with adequate hardware can download, run, modify, and build on Kimi K3 directly, without needing Moonshot’s permission or relying on Moonshot’s servers going forward.
Release Lands Amid Distillation Dispute
The timing of the release is closely tied to the controversy already surrounding the model. On July 22, White House science and technology policy director Michael Kratsios publicly accused Moonshot of covertly distilling Anthropic’s Fable model to build Kimi K3 — marking the first time a senior US official has named a specific Chinese lab for allegedly copying a specific American model. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent followed with a warning that sanctions and Entity List designations remained “on the table.”
Tonight’s full weight release complicates that timeline in one respect: independent AI researchers have pointed out that Anthropic’s Fable model only became publicly available on July 1, making it difficult for an industrial-scale distillation effort to have been the primary driver behind a model of this size being built this quickly. Regardless of how the distillation claim is eventually resolved, the release gives outside researchers their first genuine opportunity to examine Kimi K3’s architecture directly, rather than relying solely on its API behaviour.
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Why The Scale Matters Beyond The Politics
Kimi K3’s launch comes amid what is already the steepest AI pricing collapse the industry has witnessed. OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 starts at $1 per million tokens, Meta’s Muse Spark 1.1 is priced at $1.25/$4.25, and Kimi K3 itself has been running as low as $0.30 per million tokens on cached input even before tonight’s open-weight release removes the API paywall entirely for anyone capable of self-hosting it.
A 2.8-trillion-parameter model of this capability, available as a free download rather than gated behind a metered API, shifts the competitive landscape for every lab currently charging for access to comparable capability, including Anthropic and OpenAI, the very labs Kimi K3 now stands accused of having learned from.
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