Moonshot AI builds the Kimi line. Kimi K3 (Jul 2026) adds native vision under a Modified MIT license; hosted price varies by provider, around $0.60/$3 per 1M.
Moonshot AI, founded 2023, builds the Kimi line, present in the register through Kimi K3 (July 2026), which adds native vision under a Modified MIT license.
The license qualifier matters and the register states it plainly: "Modified MIT" is not standard MIT, and buyers evaluating on license terms should read the modification rather than assume full permissiveness. Hosted price varies by provider — around $0.60 / $3 per 1M — because K3 is served by third parties rather than a single first-party rate card, so quoted economics depend on where it runs.
K3 sits in the open country without an independent index mark in this survey; its standing is vendor- and community-reported. Native vision under a near-permissive license is its clearest differentiator among open peers, and an independent benchmark is the item that would fix its position relative to DeepSeek and Qwen.