Kimi K3
Moonshot AI released 2026-07-16 modified-mit
Grok 4.6 scores higher and costs less — but you would give something up.
+1.2 on the capability index and 50% cheaper ($3.00/M against $6.00/M). What you lose:
- 1.0M → 500K context
- no video input
Capability scores do not measure context length, output ceiling or which inputs a model accepts, so a higher score does not mean a drop-in replacement.
Our take
editorial — not a measurementThe strongest open-weight model in this dataset on measured intelligence — AA index 60, matching GLM 5.3 and within three points of Opus 5, with an LMArena score of 1489 at max effort. The number that stands out is latency: 3.3 seconds to first token, more than 10x faster than Opus 5 (~41s) and 30x faster than GPT-5.6 Sol (~105s). If you need near-frontier quality in an interactive product, nothing else in the sampled set is close on responsiveness. $3/$15 is not cheap for open weights, but you can self-host and escape that entirely. 1M context, 1M max output.
Strengths
- AA intelligence 60 and LMArena 1489 — frontier-adjacent
- 3.3s time-to-first-token, by far the fastest in the sampled set
- 1M context and 1M max output tokens
- Open weights — self-hostable
Weaknesses
- $3/$15 hosted is expensive relative to other open-weight options
- 35 output tokens/sec is slow once generation starts
- Modified-MIT licence not independently verified
Reach for it when
- Interactive products needing near-frontier quality
- Self-hosted frontier-adjacent deployment
- Latency-critical agentic loops
Avoid it if
- Sustained generation throughput matters more than first-token latency
- You want the cheapest hosted tokens
Every price dimension
| Input | $3.00/M |
|---|---|
| Output | $15.00/M |
| Cached input | $0.300/M |
Independent scores
| Intelligence | 59.7 |
|---|---|
| Coding | 76.2 |
| Agentic | 54.3 |
| LMArena Elo | 1476.3max |
Sources are listed separately rather than averaged. Across the 62 models both have scored they correlate at r = 0.806 — close agreement overall, but four models rank very differently between them, and a blended score would hide exactly those.
Best rankings by task
- website #1of 151 1372
- codecategories #1of 145 1407
- gamedev #1of 144 1431
- dataviz #1of 142 1376
- uicomponent #1of 140 1377
- 3d #1of 136 1445
- mobileapps #1of 56 1290
- svg #2of 98 1356
Capability
| Context window | 1.0M |
|---|---|
| Max output | 1.0M |
| Input modes | text, image, video |
| Tool use | yes |
| Reasoning | optional |
| Open weights | yes |
Provenance
| Price source | openrouter.ai |
|---|---|
| Fetched | 2026-08-24 |
| Quality data | verified |
| Cross-checked | vendor page |
Kimi K3 is a 2.8T parameter open-weight multimodal reasoning model from Moonshot AI. It is suited for complex coding, knowledge work, and long-horizon agentic workflows, and is particularly strong at...