Kimi K3 and China's Open-Weight Model Wave

Moonshot AI released Kimi K3 on July 16, and the benchmarks put an open-weight model next to the best closed ones for the first time. The catch is access. K3 sits on Moonshot's platform, GLM-5.2 on Z.ai's, DeepSeek V4 Pro on DeepSeek's, MiniMax M3 on MiniMax's — four accounts, four billing relationships, four API dashboards, all before you have written a line of code. LLM Gateway routes every one of them through a single OpenAI-compatible endpoint. One key, one bill, and a switch between Kimi K3 and any of 200+ models is a one-word change to your request. What is Kimi K3? Kimi K3 is Moonshot AI's flagship model for long-horizon coding and agentic work. At 2.8 trillion parameters — a mixture-of-experts design that activates 16 of its 896 experts per token — it is the largest open-weight model announced to date. Moonshot has committed to publishing the full weights by July 27, 2026. The specs that matter in practice: 1M-token context window (1,048,576 tokens), with output configurable up to the same 1M — enough to hold a large repository plus its docs in a single request Always-on reasoning — K3 thinks before every answer; there is no non-thinking mode Vision, tool calls, and JSON output supported out of the box Prompt caching at a 90% discount on repeated input Early results back up the size. K3 ranks fourth of 189 models on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index — level with Claude Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.5 — and took first place in Arena's Frontend Code evaluation in blind developer testing. It posted 93.5% on GPQA Diamond and 88.3% on Terminal-Bench 2.1, the strongest open-weight results published on both at release. Kimi K3 pricing Through LLM Gateway you pay Moonshot's published per-token rates: Tokens Price per million Input $3.00 Cached input $0.30 Output $15.00 The cached-input rate is the number to watch. Coding agents re-send the same system prompt, file context, and conversation history on every step, so in a long agent session most of your input tokens are