Is Kimi K3 Open Source? Weights, License, and How to Call It

Kimi K3 is an open-weight but not open-source multimodal model from Moonshot AI, with downloadable Hugging Face weights governed by a custom, non-OSI-approved Kimi K3 License that broadly permits use, modification, distribution, sale, deployment, and fine-tuning while requiring notice retention and legal compliance. Additional licensing conditions require a separate Moonshot agreement for commercial Model-as-a-Service providers exceeding $20 million in annual revenue and prominent “Kimi K3” interface attribution for certain large commercial products, although internal use and official or certified hosted access are exempt. The 2.8-trillion-parameter mixture-of-experts checkpoint activates 104 billion parameters per token, supports text, image, and video input, offers a 1,048,576-token context window, and requires substantial multi-node hardware to self-host. OpenRouter provides hosted access under the model ID moonshotai/kimi-k3, with reasoning, tool calling, structured outputs, prompt caching, and provider-dependent pricing and parameter support, but no free variant.

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