What happened
On July 16, 2026, Chinese lab Moonshot AI launched Kimi K3, a 2.8-trillion-parameter mixture-of-experts model with a one-million-token context window and an always-on reasoning mode, with full open weights due to follow later in July. On independent testing it landed near the top of the field, trailing only the strongest closed models and topping some coding leaderboards. API pricing is $3 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens.
The context
It is the largest open-weight model shipped to date and shows how fast Chinese labs are closing on US frontier systems.
Why this moves the Board: Release execution · Materiality 4 · T3 Reported → weighed for Moonshot (Kimi) at the next refresh.