Moonshot AI is publishing the weights of Kimi K3.1 Pro on Hugging Face for free download under a license that requires a separate contract if a Model-as-a-Service operator exceeds 20 million dollars in sales over 12 consecutive months. The company suspended new subscriptions in August 2026 because of GPU shortages.
Moonshot AI's public position across these four stories is a free-with-conditions model release built on rented compute. In August 2026 the company signed a contract with Alibaba to use roughly 20,000 NVIDIA chips for its Kimi series, reported as older Hopper architecture, possibly H200, though Alibaba denied supplying H200s. The same month it was negotiating with Microsoft, Amazon, and Google to host Kimi K3, asking for up to 30% revenue share, with revenue sharing, data access, and token auditing left unresolved. Moonshot AI had suspended new subscriptions because of GPU shortages.
On October 24, 2026, Moonshot AI announced Kimi K3.1 Pro: a 2.8-trillion-parameter MoE model with 104 billion active parameters and a 1-million-token context window. It scored 55 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v4.3.2, above Claude Fable 5.1, GPT-6 Astra, and Gemini 4 Argon at 53. The model was set to arrive free of charge on November 4, 2026, with API pricing at $2.00 input and $10.00 output per million tokens. (An earlier Kimi K3 release had scored higher than GPT-5.6 Sol and Claude Fable 5 in some benchmarks.)
On November 5 the weights went up on Hugging Face, free to download and use under the license. The release arrived a day after the announced November 4 date. The license keeps a commercial boundary: a Model-as-a-Service operator that exceeds 20 million dollars in sales over 12 consecutive months must sign a separate contract with Moonshot AI. The open-weight file and the paid API now sit side by side, and the cloud hosting talks are not reported as settled.
Written with AI from the cited Yomimono stories below, each itself sourced.
See our editorial policy. Every fact links
the story it came from.
5d ago
Moonshot AI has published the weights of Kimi K3.1 Pro on Hugging Face, free for anyone to download and use under the license. The model, announced on October 24 and originally slated for weights by November 4, has 2.8 trillion total parameters with 104 billion active and a context window up to 1 million tokens. The license requires a separate contract with Moonshot AI if a Model-as-a-Service operator exceeds 20 million dollars in sales over 12 consecutive months.
Oct 24
Moonshot AI announced Kimi K3.1 Pro on October 24, 2026, a 2.8-trillion-parameter MoE model with 104 billion active parameters and a 1-million-token context window. On the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v4.3.2 it scored 55, above Claude Fable 5.1, GPT-6 Astra, and Gemini 4 Argon at 53. The model arrives free of charge on November 4, 2026, with API pricing at $2.00 input and $10.00 output per million tokens.
Aug 29
Chinese AI firm Moonshot AI is negotiating with Microsoft, Amazon, and Google to host its open model Kimi K3 on their cloud services, seeking up to 30% revenue share. The talks face unresolved issues over revenue sharing, data access, and token auditing. Moonshot AI has suspended new subscriptions due to GPU shortages.
Aug 9
Bloomberg reported that Moonshot AI signed a contract with Alibaba to use approximately 20,000 NVIDIA chips for its Kimi series AI models. The chips are reportedly older Hopper architecture, possibly H200, though Alibaba denied supplying H200s. The news follows Kimi K3's release, which scored higher than GPT-5.6 Sol and Claude Fable 5 in some benchmarks.