The Vibe Father
The Kimi K3 release date was July 16, 2026. Moonshot launched the model on Kimi.com, Kimi Work, Kimi Code, and the official Kimi API that day. Its Kimi K3 launch report treats the full model weights as a separate part of the rollout and says they will be released by July 27, 2026.
That distinction clears up most of the confusion around the launch. Kimi K3 is a live product now. It is not yet a downloadable full-weight package at the time of this update.
Kimi K3 rollout timeline
| Date | Milestone | Status |
|---|---|---|
| July 16, 2026 | Kimi K3 announced and launched across Kimi products | Live |
| July 16, 2026 | kimi-k3 added to the official Kimi API | Live |
| July 16, 2026 | Max reasoning effort available at launch | Live |
| By July 27, 2026 | Full model weights planned for release | Scheduled by Moonshot |
| Later update | Low and high reasoning effort modes | Planned |
| Alongside later technical material | Full architecture and evaluation report | Planned |
What is available now
The consumer chat experience is available through Kimi.com and the Kimi mobile apps. Kimi Work supports the model for broader knowledge tasks. Kimi Code exposes K3 through its model selector. Developers can call the kimi-k3 model through the OpenAI-compatible Kimi API and use our Kimi K3 price guide to estimate the hosted cost.
Moonshot also lists Kimi Enterprise for organizations that need account separation, member management, and enterprise privacy controls. Availability and plan limits can differ by product, region, and account level.
What the July 27 weights date means
A weight release makes it possible for inference providers and research teams to package the model outside Moonshot's hosted products. It does not mean a normal laptop will be able to run a 2.8-trillion-parameter model. Hosting support, quantized builds, inference code, license terms, and enough hardware all have to line up.
Moonshot says it is working with inference partners and open-source maintainers before the weight release. That preparation matters because Kimi K3 uses new architectural pieces and a much larger expert layout than Kimi K2.
Why there are several release dates online
Search results can mix the product launch, API availability, third-party provider listings, and the future weight release into one date. They are separate events.
- Use July 16 for the official model and product launch
- Use July 27 as Moonshot's stated deadline for full weights
- Check each third-party provider for its own K3 availability date
- Treat future reasoning modes and technical reports as planned until published
What launched with Kimi K3
Kimi K3 is a 2.8-trillion-parameter sparse mixture-of-experts model with native vision and a one-million-token context window. Moonshot positions it for long-horizon coding, reasoning, and end-to-end knowledge work. Its launch materials include coding, browser, office, multimodal, research, game development, and chip-design examples.
You can follow the changing evidence on our Kimi K3 scorecard. Our hands-on Kimi K3 browser game test also shows what the launch model can produce in a real interactive project.
