Moonshot AI has published the weights for the Kimi K3 model, which contains 2.8 trillion parameters; the files are 1.56 TB on Hugging Face. The release was made available "earlier this month," in line with the company's prior announcement.
License changes and commercial restrictions
The licensing attached to Kimi K3 departs from the earlier, MIT-derived approach used for Kimi K2. For K2, Moonshot added a paragraph requiring attribution for large commercial entities: if the software (or any derivative works) is used in a commercial product or service that has more than 100 million monthly active users, or more than 20 million US dollars (or equivalent) in monthly revenue, the product must prominently display "Kimi K2" on its user interface.
The K3 license goes further and no longer calls itself a "modified MIT" license. It requires a separate agreement with Moonshot for sizable Model-as-a-Service operators. Under the K3 terms, if the licensee or any of its affiliates operates a Model as a Service business and the aggregate revenue of the licensee and its affiliates exceeds 20 million US dollars (or equivalent) in total over any consecutive 12 months, the licensee must enter into a separate agreement with Moonshot AI before using the software or derivative works for any commercial purpose.
Moonshot does not present the K3 license as open source in its own materials; it consistently uses the term "open weight" instead.
Third-party providers and pricing
OpenRouter is already offering access to K3 through seven providers. Most of these providers charge rates similar to Moonshot AI's own pricing: about $3 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens.
Why this matters
Publishing a 2.8 trillion-parameter model and 1.56 TB of weights is a notable event for broadly accessible large models, but the K3 license places meaningful constraints on commercial use by large or high-revenue Model-as-a-Service operators. The license language will affect how companies integrate the model commercially and whether they need to negotiate separate agreements with Moonshot AI once revenues cross the stated threshold.
Summary
Moonshot AI has released the Kimi K3 weights (1.56 TB) and introduced a stricter commercial license that mandates separate agreements for certain high-revenue Model-as-a-Service operators. The company uses the term "open weight," and third parties such as OpenRouter are already providing K3 access at pricing comparable to Moonshot's.
