Not Yet — Weights Land July 27
Kimi K3 launched on kimi.com and the Moonshot API on July 16, 2026, but the model weights are not public yet. Moonshot has committed to releasing the full weights on July 27, 2026, expected to land on Hugging Face under the moonshotai org, matching where prior Kimi releases (K2, K2.6) have shipped. Until that date, the only way to use K3 at all is through Moonshot's hosted API or a router like OpenRouter — there is nothing to self-host yet.
What License Should You Expect?
Moonshot has not published a K3-specific license as of July 22, 2026. The expectation, based on how Moonshot has licensed every prior Kimi release, is a modified-MIT license carrying the same attribution clause used before: commercial users above roughly 100 million monthly active users must display “Kimi” in their product UI. That is a reasonable guess grounded in precedent, not a confirmed fact — treat the license as unconfirmed until Moonshot publishes it alongside the weights.
What “Open Weight” Will Actually Mean Here
Open weights is not the same as easy to run. At 2.8 trillion total parameters across 896 experts, K3 is almost certainly out of reach for anything short of multi-H100-class hardware to run locally at full precision (an estimate — Moonshot has not published minimum hardware requirements). For most people, “open weight” K3 will mean third-party hosts and inference providers picking it up and re-serving it at a price, the way K2 and K2.6 show up on OpenRouter today, rather than something you download and run on a laptop.
Why This Matters for the China Open-Weight Race
K3 landing open-weight would put Moonshot alongside Kimi's own prior releases, GLM-5.2, and DeepSeek V4 in a run of large, competitively-benchmarked Chinese labs shipping open weights within weeks of each other in July 2026 — a trend also referenced in Alibaba's own framing of Qwen 3.8-Max. Whether K3's weights ship on schedule July 27, and under what exact license, will matter more for who actually adopts it than the benchmark scores alone, since self-hosting is the main lever governments and enterprises with data-residency requirements have for adopting a frontier-class model at all.
What to Do Between Now and July 27
Until weights land, K3 is API-only. See our Kimi K3 pricing guide for API costs, and our benchmarks post for how it actually performs. If you want K3 running behind an always-on chat agent today, both OpenClaw and Hermes Agent can call it through the Moonshot API or OpenRouter right now on OpenClaw Launch — you do not need to wait for the weights to try it as a chat model.