❯ Moonshot’s Kimi K3.1 surfaces on its API platform, reportedly with a 1M-token context and a launch next month

A new name in the registrySeveral developers found a callable kimi-k3-1 identifier in the model registry of Moonshot AI’s API platform, and a preview of K3.1 models then appeared on Kimi’s official developer platform. According to details shared by developers, K3.1 supports a context window of up to 1 million tokens, offers three reasoning-effort levels, and may add agent mode, multi-agent collaboration, and search and batch task modes. Moonshot has not officially launched it; it is expected next month.

The first upgrade after K3Moonshot open-sourced Kimi K3 in July, a sparse mixture-of-experts model of about 2.8 trillion parameters, also with a million-token context, which many in the industry called another “DeepSeek moment.” The context window determines how much material a model can read at once; a million tokens can hold an entire codebase or several long books. Reasoning-effort levels let users choose how long the model “thinks” by task difficulty: more compute for hard problems, faster and cheaper answers for easy ones.

Pricing may not be finalThe K3.1 API price currently shown matches K3, though it may be a placeholder. If the effort levels map to different compute configurations and billing, the cost of calling Kimi will depend more on which level developers choose than on the model name. For developers, it also means another long-context model with open-source roots joining the fight, pushing prices down further for long-document and coding work.

▪ SIGNALChinese model makers are moving from chasing a benchmark score to selling one model at several price points, making pricing design as important as capability.