Chinese startup Moonshot AI has released Kimi K3, a giant new artificial-intelligence system that it says is now the largest freely available AI model on the planet. The model went live on 16 July 2026.
Kimi K3 is built with 2.8 trillion parameters, the internal settings a model uses to make decisions, making it roughly 75 percent bigger than DeepSeek’s V4 Pro, which has about 1.6 trillion. It is what engineers call an open-weight model, meaning the company plans to release the full model for anyone to download, run and build on, with those weights due on 27 July.
In plain terms, that openness matters because developers and startups anywhere, including here in Africa, can use such a model for their own products, often at little or no cost, instead of paying to rent access from a foreign tech giant.
The model can handle a huge amount of information at once thanks to a one-million-token context window, understands images as well as text, and runs an always-on reasoning feature the company calls thinking mode. Moonshot says it trails Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5 and OpenAI’s GPT 5.6 Sol overall, but beat older heavyweights including Claude Opus 4.8 and GPT 5.5 on coding and general agent tasks.
Founded in 2023 and backed by Chinese tech giants Alibaba and Tencent, Moonshot was valued at about $20 billion after a roughly $2 billion raise in May 2026, and reported annual recurring revenue above $200 million as of April.
The launch rattled rivals at home. Shares linked to competitors Zhipu and Z.ai each fell about 28.4 percent, while MiniMax dropped 15.6 percent as investors reacted to the surprise.
The achievement is notable because Chinese firms have been squeezed by United States export controls that limit their access to top chips such as Nvidia’s H200, yet they are still closing the gap with American labs.
Source: Forbes.
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