What is Kimi K3? China's 2.8 trillion parameter AI model taking on Claude Fable 5 and GPT-5.6

Chinese AI startup Moonshot AI has unveiled its latest AI model, Kimi K3, to take on the likes of OpenAI's GPT-5.6 and Anthropic's Claude Fable 5. The latest AI model comes with 2.8 trillion parameters, native vision capabilities and a 1 million-token context window. Moonshot says K3 is designed for coding, reasoning and long-form knowledge work.

What is Kimi K3?

Moonshot says its latest AI model is adept at a wide range of tasks, including software engineering and long-horizon coding, scientific research, financial analysis, knowledge work, interactive presentations, image understanding, video editing and AI agents.

The company also said that K3 completed a number of complex engineering tasks autonomously, including optimising GPU kernels, building a Triton-like GPU compiler from scratch, creating a browser-based 3D game and even designing a chip for running smaller AI models.

Moonshot also claims the model can independently review dozens of research papers, generate thousands of lines of code and build interactive dashboards for scientific analysis.

The company says Kimi K3 outperforms competitors like GPT-5.5, Claude Opus 4.8 and GLM-5.2 across multiple software engineering and automation tests, while remaining close to Claude Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol on several coding benchmarks.

You can check out K3's full benchmarks below:

Moonshot pauses new subscriptions:

In a post on X (formerly Twitter), Moonshot announced that Kimi K3 has received far more demand than expected that has pushed its current capacity to its limits. The company announced that it is pausing new subscriptions in order to prioritize the current users.

“Kimi K3 has received far more love than we expected, and our GPUs are feeling it.Over the past 48 hours, demand has pushed close to the limits of our current capacity. To protect the experience of existing subscribers, we're temporarily pausing new subscriptions and prioritizing compute for current members. Existing subscribed users are not affected.” Moonshot wrote in a post

"We're adding capacity as fast as we can and will reopen new subscription spots in batches. Going forward, we'll also split membership into two more focused plans: Kimi Membership for Kimi Web, App, and Work; and Kimi Code Membership for coding workflows. This will help us match compute more precisely and keep the experience stable." it added