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Moonshot Dropped a Spoiler for Kimi K3.1

Author
Viner Shakirov
Oct 23, 2026, 11:21 UTC
Reading time: 8 min
News & releases
Moonshot Dropped a Spoiler for Kimi K3.1

On October 23, Kimi's official account on X posted a 24-second video in which the Kimi Code terminal shows the line "Model: Kimi K3.1". Three hours later Arena.ai wrote: "A new model from @Kimi_Moonshot is coming. Stay tuned for where it lands in the Arena." The name K3.1 now appears in an official Moonshot video, but the company has not named a release date, specs or a price. Everything else people say about the model remains rumor and guesswork.

What Moonshot Itself Showed

The video was posted at 01:41 UTC, and the post itself has no text. It opens on the screen of an old computer running Kimi Code: the header reads "Model: Kimi K3.1", the program version is 2.2.0, and the task line says "Build a complex procedural 3D scene in Three.js". The bottom line reads "Kimi K3.1 thinking: high", so the reasoning mode is set to a high level. Then comes a montage of frames and 3D objects, ending with a moon and the Kimi logo.

Video source: @Kimi_Moonshot on X, October 23, 2026.

This is the strongest of the signals: the company itself showed the name K3.1. But the video does not say that this particular model made the montage frames, and it gives no release date, specs or price.

What Arena Said

Arena's post went out at 04:46 UTC. It is a single sentence: a new Moonshot model is coming soon, and Arena will show where it lands in the ranking. It gives no model name, version or date, so the link to Kimi's video is an inference from timing, not something Arena said.

Timeline: How the Name K3.1 Surfaced

  • September 19. On Kimi's verified account on Zhihu, a Chinese question-and-answer platform, an uncaptioned post appeared: a long string of digits of pi after "3.1". The community reads it as a hint at version 3.1. Since the post has no caption, this is an interpretation, not the company's words.
  • Late September. According to reports, the identifier "kimi-k3-1" was spotted in the Moonshot API.
  • October 21. LuminaBench, an author of AI news and benchmarks on X, found in Kimi Code, Moonshot's coding tool, a model-switching rule pointing to "k3.1". It came with an English warning: continuing the session on Kimi 3.1 may affect output quality, and you need to choose how to continue. RuntimeWire called it a "prelaunch clue, not a product announcement."
  • October 22. In Code Arena battles, where users don't know which model they will get, an anonymous model named Kibitz was spotted. Part of the community believes it is K3.1. Arena has not confirmed this.
  • October 23. Kimi's official video with "Model: Kimi K3.1" and Arena's post saying a new Kimi model is coming soon.

Why Kibitz Is Thought to Be Kimi

The community's arguments are all circumstantial:

  • Tokenizer. According to the AGTP account, a tracker bot on X tested Kibitz on 11 test tokens that exist only in Moonshot's vocabulary. The model garbled all 11 in both attempts, as other Kimi models do. Models from seven other labs copied them correctly.
  • The model's answer. Asked who it is, Kibitz says it is Kimi. That is easy to fake, so I don't count it as proof.
  • Names. Earlier Kimi models also ran on Arena under codenames: K2.5 as Kiwido, K2.6 as Kiwire, K3 as Kivine. Kibitz sounds similar.

Kimi's video with the name K3.1 makes the link between Kibitz and Kimi more plausible, but it does not prove that Kibitz and K3.1 are the same model. Only Moonshot or Arena can confirm that.

What We Know About Kimi K3.1

LuminaBench posted several examples that, according to him, were made with K3.1. The first is a voxel pagoda compared with other frontier models. The author writes that the tower almost copies the design of GPT-6 Astra.

Video source: @LuminaBench on X, October 22, 2026.

The second is a 3D train with a speed slider, an exploded view, a wireframe mode and statistics. The author says he got it on the first try.

Video source: @LuminaBench on X, October 22, 2026.

The third is a medieval voxel castle. The author writes that the model ran in Arena under the name Kibitz and feels "identical to GPT-6.1 Sol Max with a sprinkle of Sonnet's design taste." In the same post he added that they "fixed the speed problems" in the new model.

Video source: @LuminaBench on X, October 22, 2026.

What can be taken from this:

  • These are three videos by one author, with one prompt and one attempt each. You cannot compare models with a test like that.
  • "Looks like GPT" and "Sonnet's taste" are subjective impressions, not measurements.
  • The words about fixed speed are also his opinion. They can only be confirmed or refuted after release, on real requests.
  • The author himself decides which model is in the video: the names "Kimi K3.1" and "Kibitz" are his claim.

To have something to compare the new model against, here is a short summary of the current one. Kimi K3 came out on July 16, 2026. Details are in our Kimi K3 review.

ParameterKimi K3
ArchitectureMixture of Experts, 2.8 trillion parameters
Context1M tokens
Weightsopen, license with restrictions on commercial use
Price in GPTunneL$0.006 per 1K input tokens, $0.03 per 1K output tokens
Intelligence Index, Artificial Analysis44 points
Speed, Artificial Analysis36.9 tokens per second, 72nd of 78

On July 16, Arena put K3 in first place in the Frontend Code Arena with 1679 points, ahead of Claude Fable 5. So Arena's attention to the new Kimi is not accidental: the previous model did very well there.

Speed is K3's weak spot: Artificial Analysis calls the model "notably slow." If K3.1 fixes that, as Lumina writes, it will matter more than any gain in scores.

When Will the Model Come Out?

There is no official date. Rumors are circulating: one author on X wrote on October 22 that the model would come out "before Tuesday next week," meaning before October 27. According to AGTP, about 30 hours passed between K3's first appearance on Arena and its release, so some guess Friday and others Monday or Tuesday. There is no confirmation: these are forecasts, not Moonshot's schedule.

A reminder about Qwen 4: in the same days another anonymous model, Kalmia, was seen on Arena, and people are guessing about it too. We covered it in a separate article.

What to Expect?

K3.1's parameters are not known yet: Moonshot has not named the size, the context, the price or the license terms. We can expect a near-flagship or flagship-level model: the previous Kimi K3 took first place in the Frontend Code Arena on its release day, and Kimi's video shows the same specialty, generating complex 3D scenes in code. This is an expectation, not data: real scores and ranking positions will appear only after release.

The main question is availability. It is not yet known how accessible the model will be to ordinary users without a subscription plan or an API purchase. The previous version, Kimi K3, was practically unusable because of long waiting queues.

When the model comes out, we will update this article with prices, scores and a comparison with K3.

Where to Try

Kimi K3 is already available in GPTunneL together with other top models: one balance, no subscriptions. You can test it on your own task now and compare it with the new version when it comes out.

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