Kimi is an artificial intelligence chatbot and a series of large language models developed by the Chinese company Moonshot AI. The system is available via web interface, API, and a command-line agent, and supports multimodal input including images and video. Kimi models are released with open weights, allowing external use and modification, though some versions carry custom licensing terms.
The Kimi series has gained attention for its large parameter counts and extended context windows. Its flagship model, Kimi K3, released in July 2026, is the largest open-weights model at 2.8 trillion parameters. The models have also been used as the basis for other AI systems, including those developed by US companies.
History
Moonshot AI was founded in March 2023 in China. The Kimi chatbot was officially released in October 2023, initially in closed beta. In July 2024, a context caching feature entered public beta. On 11 October 2024, Kimi Explore Edition launched globally with autonomous search capabilities; monthly active users subsequently exceeded 36 million.
In September 2025, Moonshot AI introduced an agentic feature called "OK Computer" that can generate multi-page websites and editable slides from simple prompts, process up to 1 million rows of input data, and output text, audio, images, and video. In August 2026, legal startup Harvey unveiled a new model built using Kimi.
Models
The first public version of Kimi, released on 16 November 2023, supported a lossless context of 128,000 tokens, making it the first AI model capable of accepting contexts of that size. In March 2024, Moonshot AI began closed beta testing of an updated version with a 2 million character context window. In November 2024, internal testing of an AI video generation model began.
On 20 January 2025, Kimi K1.5 was released, with Moonshot AI claiming it matched OpenAI o1 in mathematics, coding, and multimodal reasoning. In April 2025, the company released Kimi-VL, an open-source 16 billion parameter mixture of experts (MoE) model with 3 billion active parameters, followed by Kimi-VL-Thinking in June. Also in June 2025, Kimi-Dev, a 72B parameter coding model based on Qwen2.5-72B, and Kimi-Researcher, an autonomous research agent, were released.
In July 2025, Moonshot AI released Kimi K2, a 1 trillion parameter MoE model with 32 billion active parameters, open-sourced under a modified MIT license. An updated version, Kimi-K2-Instruct-0905, released on 9 September 2025, improved coding performance and extended the context window from 128K to 256K tokens. Kimi K2.5, released in January 2026, added multimodal vision and language understanding with advanced agentic capabilities. Kimi K2.6 followed in April 2026, and Kimi K2.7 Code in June 2026.
Kimi K3
Moonshot AI released Kimi K3 on 16 July 2026, with 2.8 trillion parameters. It debuted at No. 3 on the Artificial Analysis AI leaderboard, behind Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 and OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol, but outperformed competitors on Arena.ai's front-end web development benchmark. The weights were released on 27 July under a custom license requiring companies with annual revenue over US$20 million to negotiate a contract before providing the model as a service, and companies with monthly revenue over $20 million or over 100 million monthly active users to display attribution.
Usage and Impact
Kimi models have been used as the basis or for post-training of US models, including Thinking Machines Lab's Inkling and Cursor's Composer 2. The open-weights approach has facilitated adoption across various applications, from coding assistants to legal tech.
In September 2026, Anthropic accused Moonshot of covertly routing Kimi requests to its Claude models and distilling Claude via these responses. Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, also accused Moonshot of making Kimi K3 by distilling Anthropic's Claude Fable model. These allegations have raised questions about the provenance of some Kimi models.
See Also
- Reasoning model - Large language model designed for reasoning tasks
- List of chatbots
- List of AI-assisted software development tools