The summer of open models: Kimi K3 reshuffles the AI deck
In brief — Late July marks the heaviest concentration of "open-weight" model releases the sector has ever seen. The high point this Monday: Moonshot AI released the weights of Kimi K3, now the largest open model in the world. Against this backdrop, a European regulatory deadline is drawing closer and money keeps pouring in at a record pace.
Kimi K3, the behemoth anyone can download
At midnight UTC this 27 July, Moonshot AI put online the open weights of Kimi K3, a 2.8-trillion-parameter model that anyone can now download for free. It is today the largest open model on the planet: it natively processes text, images and video, handles a context window of one million tokens, and thanks to MXFP4 quantization brings its footprint down to roughly 1.4 TB of storage. On the API side, pricing hovers around $3 per million input tokens and $15 for output.
The event is not isolated. The previous week had already seen the stable release of DeepSeek V4, and the quarter was punctuated by a series of hefty open models — GLM-5.2, Qwen 3.6 — that are nibbling away at the gap with proprietary models. The message sent to businesses is clear: cutting-edge performance is no longer reserved for closed APIs.
The “frontier” model battle continues
On the closed-lab side, the pace is not slackening either. The most recent releases include Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 5 (30 June), OpenAI’s gradual rollout of the GPT-5.6 family that began in late June, and xAI’s Grok 4.5 (8 July). In comparative rankings, Anthropic keeps the overall lead — but on the specific terrain of web development, it is precisely Kimi that springs a surprise by unseating the competition.
In parallel, the infrastructure follows suit: NVIDIA and SK hynix have sealed a multi-year partnership to co-develop next-generation memory aligned with the chipmaker’s AI roadmap — a sign that the race is being run as much on silicon as on algorithms.
Europe: the AI Act countdown
For European players, one date is approaching: 2 August 2026, the general application deadline of the AI Act for systems classified as high-risk. With less than two weeks to go, compliance is becoming the top priority for the continent’s legal and technical departments.
In terms of momentum, the European ecosystem is not lagging behind. The French start-up Gradium has just crossed the $100 million mark in funds raised and is opening an office in the San Francisco Bay Area, while Atos has unveiled MogwAI, a generative and agentic AI platform designed for critical environments.
Money, always money
Global venture capital reached a record $510 billion in the first half of 2026, with artificial intelligence alone capturing more than 70% of second-quarter investment. The concentration of capital on the sector shows no sign of running out of steam — enough to fuel the next wave of models.
Key takeaways
- Kimi K3 (Moonshot AI, 2.8 trillion parameters) becomes the largest open model in the world, available for free download since this morning.
- Open-weight is establishing itself as an underlying trend: DeepSeek V4, GLM-5.2, Qwen 3.6 are shrinking the gap with closed models.
- AI Act deadline of 2 August for high-risk systems: compliance is becoming urgent in Europe.
- Venture capital is breaking records ($510bn in H1), driven 70% by AI.