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K3's license drops the 'modified MIT' label and goes further — companies running a Model-as-a-Service business with aggregate revenue exceeding $20M over 12 months must enter a separate agreement with Moonshot before any commercial use.

The K3 license no longer claims to be modified MIT; it requires large MAAS operators to sign a separate agreement with Moonshot before commercial deployment. ✦ AI generated

Author · Simon Willison's Weblog · 2026-07-27 · original ↗

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The K3 license no longer calls itself 'modified MIT' and goes further, requiring a separate agreement with Moonshot for those larger companies: If the Licensee or any of its affiliates operates a Model as a Service business, and the aggregate revenue of the Licensee and its affiliates exceeds 20 million US dollars (or the equivalent in other currencies) in total over any consecutive 12 months, the Licensee must enter into a separate agreement with Moonshot AI before using the Software or its derivative works for any commercial purpose.

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▦ Moonshot AI ✳ Kimi K3

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Kimi K2 used a janky modified MIT license that required large commercial entities to prominently display 'Kimi K2' in their user interface.Author · Simon Willison's Weblog · conf 85%Moonshot have released the weights for their 2.8 trillion parameter Kimi K3, a 1.56TB download on Hugging Face.Author · Simon Willison's Weblog · conf 80%

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provides context → Kimi makes no attempt to describe this as an 'open source' license, consistently using the term 'open weight' instead — which is honest.Author · Simon Willison's Weblog provides context → The rise of capable open-weight models like K3 could push the U.S. government to consider slowing down Anthropic and OpenAI by requiring pre-release review of domestic models, even though K3's own statistical audits contained methodological errors.Ethan Mollick · Big Technology