Kimi K3.1 Pro: a huge Chinese model at about half Claude Opus prices

Moonshot AI released Kimi K3.1 Pro, a 2.8-trillion-parameter model with a 1 million token memory that reads images too, now live in the Kimi app, Kimi Code and the API at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, with open weights promised by 4 November. Moonshot says it beats leading US models on 6 of 14 benchmarks and sits just behind Opus 5.5 on terminal coding tasks, but those are all its own tests, with no independent results yet. @kimmonismus flagged it.

Why it mattersIf you pay for AI by the token, a strong model at half the price is worth a side-by-side test on your own tasks. Two cautions: the API is run by a China-based company, so check where your client data goes before using it, and 'run it locally' talk ignores that a model this size needs a server cluster, not a laptop.

How we knowCompany figures are labelled as their own claims; anything we couldn't verify is labelled as a report or a claim.