Kimi K3.1 Pro: near the top, half the price, weights promised
Moonshot AI released Kimi K3.1 Pro on its API, and it was the top story on Hacker News with 915 points. It is not open-weight yet. Open-weight means anyone can download the model files and run them. Moonshot promises full weights by November 4, 2026.
The price is $2 per million tokens in and $10 per million out (a token is a small piece of text). That is the same as GPT-6.1 Sol and half the price of Claude Opus 5.5. A "Highspeed" version runs 2 to 3 times faster for double the price. On the Artificial Analysis index, it ranks fourth, only 3 points behind Opus 5.5.
This fits another signal: IBM's CEO says businesses are choosing open-weight models over expensive frontier AI. If the weights arrive on time, many companies could run a near-top model on their own machines.
Top AI is getting cheaper and more open, which means more choice and less dependence on a few US labs. It also means powerful models will spread with no one able to pull them back.
