Kimi

Kimi is Moonshot AI's consumer assistant and API surface. The live site at kimi.com now sells "Kimi AI with K3" for agentic coding and knowledge work, not the 256K / K2-only product this page used to describe. The model card for the consumer and API flagship is Kimi K3. The terminal coding agent is Kimi Code CLI. This page is the product, not a single checkpoint.

API traffic goes to https://api.moonshot.ai/v1 with MOONSHOT_API_KEY. Docs and keys live on platform.kimi.ai. Rechecked 2026-08-17: the chat catalog leads with kimi-k3, plus kimi-k2.7-code-highspeed for coding speed and kimi-k2.6 as a prior generation.

Key Features

• K3 as the default brain: Flagship chat and API model. It always reasons. Official reasoning_effort values are low, high, and max (default max).
• 1,048,576-token API context: K3's documented context is 1M tokens, not the old 256K window.
• Coding siblings: Use Kimi Code in the terminal, or call kimi-k2.7-code-highspeed when you want a faster coding model instead of full K3.
• Consumer + API split: kimi.com is the assistant. platform.kimi.ai is the developer console.

Use Cases

• Long briefs and repos that need a 1M-token window without you chunking the source first.
• Agentic coding when you want Moonshot's own assistant rather than a third-party wrapper.
• Teams already on Kimi Code who still need a browser chat for specs, reviews, and research.

Limitation: membership copy on kimi.com says Kimi and Kimi Code benefits will split. Do not assume one plan covers both products forever. English-first teams should also test latency and language quality themselves. We did not re-verify China-only student CNY plans.

Pricing

Consumer membership on kimi.com/membership/pricing (2026-08-17). Annual effective prices are listed first; monthly list price is in parentheses.

K3 API on platform.kimi.ai/docs/pricing/chat-k3: $3.00 input miss, $0.30 cache hit, $15.00 output, per 1M tokens. Context 1,048,576. We dropped older $0.60 / $2.50 API figures, third-party reseller prices, a 36M MAU claim, and a $4.3B valuation. monthlyVisits: 3600000 is the existing catalog figure, not a new audit.

Getting Started

1. Open kimi.com for chat, or platform.kimi.ai for an API key.
2. Set MOONSHOT_API_KEY and base_url=https://api.moonshot.ai/v1.
3. Call kimi-k3 unless you have a reason to pin kimi-k2.7-code-highspeed or kimi-k2.6.
4. If the job is a repo, start in Kimi Code CLI instead of pasting files into chat.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Kimi still a 256K chatbot?

No. The current flagship API context is 1,048,576 tokens on K3.

Is Kimi the same as Kimi K3 or Kimi Code?

No. Kimi is the assistant and API product. Kimi K3 is the model. Kimi Code is the terminal agent.

Can I keep using K2.6?

Yes. The platform still lists kimi-k2.6 and a K2.7 coding speed model next to K3.

Alternatives

• Doubao: ByteDance consumer assistant if you are already in that stack.
• ChatGPT: OpenAI's consumer chat if you want that ecosystem.
• Kimi Code CLI: Terminal-first coding instead of the website.

Tips

1. Read K3 pricing on the platform, not old blog posts that still quote $0.60 input.
2. Treat membership and API bills as separate. The music-named plans are consumer seats.
3. Recheck the membership banner. Kimi vs Kimi Code entitlements are being split.

Conclusion

Kimi is Moonshot's live assistant, now led by K3 with a 1M-token API and a small family of K2.x coding models. Start at kimi.com or the K3 pricing page, then jump to the K3 model page if you need weights and architecture.