Model comparison

Kimi K3 vs Mistral Large 3

Moonshot AI against Mistral, compared on context, price, and verified benchmark results.

Catalog record checked September 5, 2026Individual provider fields may changeEvidence confidence: High — see receipts below

Moonshot AI

Kimi K3

Frontier · Open weights

Mistral

Mistral Large 3

Frontier · Open weights

AI model capability comparison
Specification	Kimi K3	Mistral Large 3
Provider	Moonshot AI	Mistral
Tier	Frontier	Frontier
Context window	Winner: 1.05M	262K
Max output	128K	Winner: 262K
Input / 1M tokens	$3	Winner: $0.50
Output / 1M tokens	$15	Winner: $1.50
Weights	Open	Open
Parameters	2.8T (open-weight MoE)	675B total / 41B active (sparse MoE)
Reasoning levels	low, high, max	Not verifiedUnverified
Modalities	text, image, video	text, image
License	Not disclosedUnverified	Apache 2.0
API model id	kimi-k3	mistral-large-3
Released	July 16, 2026	December 1, 2025
Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index [max] (2026-08-14)	60	Not verifiedUnverified
Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index (2026-08-14)	Not verifiedUnverified	46
Terminal-Bench 2.1 (2026-07-27)	88.3	Not verifiedUnverified
GPQA Diamond (2026-07-27)	Winner: 93.5	43.9
Humanity's Last Exam (2026-07-27)	56	Not verifiedUnverified
SWE-bench Verified (2026-09-01)	93.4	Not verifiedUnverified

Prices are USD per million tokens at standard rates, excluding batch and caching discounts. Bold indicates the better figure where one is objectively better. Values we could not confirm from the provider are shown as “Not verified” rather than estimated.

Benchmark receipts

2026-09-01: vals.ai SWE-bench Verified leaderboard (independent, mini-swe-agent bash-only); not published by Moonshot; a 76.8 aggregator claim is low-reliability — both notedReal GitHub issue resolution: does the model's patch pass the hidden tests. Comparability: comparable with caveat — Post-audit vendor claims and pre-audit scores sit on different task trust levels; scaffolding (agent harness, compute budget) also dominates results. Never aggregate across scaffolds.
2026-08-14: Artificial AnalysisComposite index blending reasoning, knowledge, and coding evals into one 0–100 score. Comparability: directly comparable — AA occasionally rebaselines the index scale between snapshots — a score captured on one date is only comparable to same-snapshot scores (check measuredAt).
2026-07-27: Kimi K3 HF model card (vendor, with tools; 43.5 no tools)Agentic terminal work: multi-step tasks executed in a sandboxed shell environment. Comparability: comparable with caveat — Scores across Terminal-Bench major versions (v1 vs v2) are NOT comparable; harness configuration (container, time limits) also shifts results.
2025-12-02: Mistral — Introducing Mistral 3 (vendor, base model, 5-shot no CoT); independent review concursGraduate-level science reasoning: multiple-choice questions written by domain PhDs. Comparability: comparable with caveat — Small question pool: differences under ~2 points are within run-to-run noise. Chain-of-thought vs direct answering must match to compare.

Pricing tiers: Kimi K3: $3/$15 per MTok; cached input $0.30/MTok. Open-weight under the custom Kimi K3 License (not a standard open-source licence). 2.8T MoE with native vision. · Mistral Large 3: Mistral first-party API $0.50/$1.50 per MTok; cached input $0.05/MTok. Open weights (Apache 2.0), EU-hosted.

FrontierOpen weightsRecord checked September 3, 2026

Kimi K3

Kimi K3 is Moonshot AI's open-weight frontier model — 2.8T MoE, 1M context, tied near the top of open-weight leaderboards.

Best for

Open-weight frontier work
Long-context
Multimodal

Watch out

Self-hosting needs large clusters; hosted rates vary.

FrontierOpen weightsRecord checked September 5, 2026

Mistral Large 3

Mistral Large 3 is Mistral's flagship — 262K-context, multimodal, Apache-2.0 open-weight at $0.50/$1.50.

Best for

Open-weight deployments
Multimodal EU-hosted inference
Balanced frontier work

Watch out

Verify multimodal support and EU data-residency on your endpoint.

When the cheaper one wins

Mistral Large 3 is cheaper on output at $1.50 per million tokens against $15 for Kimi K3 — about 10×. Use the cheaper tier for classification, extraction, summarisation, and any task where the expensive model’s extra score does not change the accepted output. The expensive one only pays if your hardest task actually fails on the cheap tier. These are standard-tier API rates, excluding batch and cache discounts.

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Evidence confidence: High

How strong and complete the evidence behind this comparison is — not a prediction of which model is better.

Pricing verified on both sides — Input and output rates are verified for both models.
4/5 core specs verified on both sides — Not published for at least one side: reasoning levels.
2 shared named benchmarks with differing scores — Measured on: Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, GPQA Diamond.
Verified within the last 90 days — Newest catalog check was 6 days ago.
Both models carry source citations — Each side has at least two catalog sources on record.

Source receipts

Each catalog figure was checked against the provider or an independent second source on the date shown.

Kimi K3: HuggingFace — Kimi K3 (accessed 2026-08-29)
Kimi K3: Moonshot — Kimi K3 guide (accessed 2026-08-29)
Mistral Large 3: Mistral docs — mistral-large-2512 (675B total / 41B active, 256K) (accessed 2026-09-05)
Mistral Large 3: Mistral — Introducing Mistral 3 (sparse MoE parameters) (accessed 2026-09-05)

Related comparisons

Diving deeper on one model? Kimi K3 · Mistral Large 3

Common questions

Kimi K3 vs Mistral Large 3

Answered from the verified figures on this page rather than general guidance.

Is Kimi K3 or Mistral Large 3 cheaper for input?

Mistral Large 3 is cheaper at $0.50 per million input tokens, against $3 for Kimi K3 — roughly 6.0× the price. Output tokens usually dominate a real bill, so weigh the output rate more heavily than the input rate. These are base rates; Kimi K3 has tiered pricing: $3/$15 per MTok; cached input $0.30/MTok. Open-weight under the custom Kimi K3 License (not a standard open-source licence). 2.8T MoE with native vision. Mistral Large 3 has tiered pricing: Mistral first-party API $0.50/$1.50 per MTok; cached input $0.05/MTok. Open weights (Apache 2.0), EU-hosted.

Is Kimi K3 or Mistral Large 3 cheaper for output?

Mistral Large 3 is cheaper at $1.50 per million output tokens, against $15 for Kimi K3 — roughly 10× the price. Output tokens usually dominate a real bill, so weigh the output rate more heavily than the input rate. These are base rates; Kimi K3 has tiered pricing: $3/$15 per MTok; cached input $0.30/MTok. Open-weight under the custom Kimi K3 License (not a standard open-source licence). 2.8T MoE with native vision. Mistral Large 3 has tiered pricing: Mistral first-party API $0.50/$1.50 per MTok; cached input $0.05/MTok. Open weights (Apache 2.0), EU-hosted.

Which has the larger context window, Kimi K3 or Mistral Large 3?

Kimi K3 accepts 1.05M tokens against 262K for Mistral Large 3. This only matters if you routinely send very long documents or large codebases.

Should I use Kimi K3 or Mistral Large 3?

Both sit in the frontier tier, so the choice usually comes down to price and context rather than capability. Kimi K3 suits open-weight frontier work; Mistral Large 3 suits open-weight deployments.

Next step

Choosing between them

The verified figures that separate this pair, computed from the catalog rather than restated boilerplate.

Input price: Mistral Large 3 costs $0.50 per 1M tokens versus $3 for Kimi K3 — a 6x difference at the headline tier.
Context: Kimi K3 takes 1.05M against 262K for Mistral Large 3 — only decisive if your prompts approach the smaller window.
Measured capability: Kimi K3 leads Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index 60 to 46 (measured 2026-08-14).

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