Kimi K3
Hugging Face (open weights) Open weights
The catch: 2.8T parameters puts self-hosting out of reach for most teams, and API resellers with over US$20M yearly revenue need a separate agreement with Moonshot.
| Access | Open weights |
|---|---|
| Free limits | Free to download and self-host; you pay only for your own compute. 2.8T total / 104B active (MoE), so it needs a large multi-GPU cluster. 1M-token context; reads text, images and video. Released 13 Jun 2026. |
| Modality | text, code, image, video |
| Credit card | Not required |
| Commercial use | Allowed |
| Trains on your data | – |
| Licence or terms | Kimi K3 License |
| Context window | 1,048,576 tokens |
| Model id | moonshotai/Kimi-K3 |
| Base URL | – |
| Last checked | 8 Oct 2026 |
How to use Kimi K3
Download the weights and serve them yourself; the quickstart below shows one way. Licence: Kimi K3 License.
Quickstart
vllm serve moonshotai/Kimi-K3 --trust-remote-code --tensor-parallel-size 8 --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser kimi_k3 --reasoning-parser kimi_k3
Paste into Claude Code
I want to run the open-weight model "Kimi K3" (moonshotai/Kimi-K3) for my project. Please: 1. Check the model card and tell me the hardware it needs and the simplest way to serve it (vLLM, SGLang, Ollama or a hosted endpoint). 2. Give me a minimal working setup and a test request. 3. Tell me the licence terms for commercial use. 4. If a cheaper or smaller variant would do the job, mention it.
Before you ship on it
- 2.8T parameters puts self-hosting out of reach for most teams, and API resellers with over US$20M yearly revenue need a separate agreement with Moonshot.
- Kimi K3 License (LICENSE in the HF repo): MIT-style grant. If you or affiliates run a 'Model as a Service' business and have over US$20 million revenue in any 12 months, you need a separate agreement with Moonshot…
- Free to run means you pay for the GPUs, the serving stack and the on-call.
Questions
Is Kimi K3 free?
Yes. Open weights offers it as open weights, with these limits: Self-host free · Kimi K3 License. No credit card is needed.
Can I use Kimi K3 commercially?
Yes, under Kimi K3 License. Check the current terms before you ship.
How do I start with Kimi K3?
Download the weights and serve them yourself; the quickstart below shows one way. Licence: Kimi K3 License.
Source: huggingface.co/moonshotai/Kimi-K3, checked 8 Oct 2026.