Perplexity Adds Kimi K3, the World's Largest Open-Weight Model, on US Servers
Perplexity brings Moonshot AI's record-breaking 2.8T-parameter open-weight model to its search and agentic platform, with a US-only hosting pledge to sidestep data sovereignty concerns.
- Perplexity added Kimi K3 to its platform and Perplexity Computer for Pro ($20/mo) and Max ($200/mo) subscribers.
- Kimi K3 is the world's largest open-weight model at 2.8 trillion parameters, with a 1M-token context window and native vision from Beijing-based Moonshot AI.
- Perplexity is hosting the model exclusively on US-based servers, directly addressing data sovereignty concerns tied to Chinese AI law.
- K3 benchmarks neck-and-neck with Anthropic and OpenAI's top models on coding and reasoning tasks, at roughly one-third the output token cost of Claude Fable 5.
- The US government is actively considering banning Chinese AI models post-K3 launch; Moonshot has denied allegations of using restricted Nvidia chips or distilling US model outputs.
- Independent testing flagged a 51% hallucination rate and a confirmed April 2026 cross-user data leak from Moonshot's own API -- Perplexity's US-hosted inference layer mitigates but does not eliminate all risk.
Perplexity has quietly dropped one of the most consequential model additions to its platform in months: Kimi K3 is now available inside both Perplexity and Perplexity Computer for Pro and Max subscribers. The move brings a frontier-class Chinese open-weight model into one of the most widely used AI search products in the US -- and Perplexity is making a pointed promise about where your data actually lives.
The model behind the headline
Kimi K3 is the flagship release from Beijing-based Moonshot AI, and its specs are hard to ignore. It is a 2.8-trillion-parameter Mixture-of-Experts model with native vision and a 1-million-token context window. To put that in perspective, Kimi K3 is roughly 75 percent larger than DeepSeek's V4 Pro, which sits at approximately 1.6 trillion parameters.
It is the world's first open-source model in the 3-trillion-parameter class, designed for frontier intelligence scenarios including long-horizon coding, knowledge work, and reasoning. The architecture leans on two internal innovations: Kimi Delta Attention, a hybrid linear attention mechanism, and Attention Residuals, which the company describes as a drop-in replacement for residual connections that delivers consistent scaling gains. In plain terms, these techniques help information flow more efficiently through very long sequences without the usual degradation that plagues large models.
It is suited for complex coding, knowledge work, and long-horizon agentic workflows, and is particularly strong at navigating large repositories, using tools, debugging, and iterating against images, logs, tests, and runtime feedback.
K3 also ships with always-on reasoning -- you cannot turn it off, but you can dial down the reasoning effort with a reasoning_effort flag set to low, high, or max (default).
Where Perplexity fits in
Perplexity is not just a chat interface. Perplexity Computer runs multi-step workflows across research, coding, design, and deployment from a single prompt, routing tasks across 20 specialized models and connecting to 400+ applications. Kimi K3 now joins that model roster, giving Computer a new option for the heavy-lifting tasks where its 1M context window and coding chops shine most.