Moonshot's Kimi K3 Is China's Priciest Open Model Yet

Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 — a 2.8-trillion-parameter model announced this week with open weights promised for July 27th — extends China's pattern of releasing frontier-scale models as open weights, and briefly tops a community-run frontend coding leaderboard ahead of Claude Fable 5. But it complicates the familiar 'China competes on cheap and open' narrative: at fifteen dollars per million output tokens, it matches Claude Sonnet and is the most expensive model a Chinese lab has released, nearly quadrupling Moonshot's prior pricing. Set against Mira Murati's Thinking Machines shipping the open-weight Inkling model a day earlier, the episode weighs whether open weights plus a premium price is a coherent strategy — a bet that the July 27th weight release will start to settle.

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