Kimi K3 Open Source

OpenRouter published a breakdown of the license Moonshot attached to Kimi K3. The weights are public and the terms grant broad rights to use and resell the model. The license is custom, though, and has not been approved by the Open Source Initiative. Above certain scale thresholds it adds two conditions: a revenue gate for companies offering the model as a service, and a requirement to show attribution in the product interface. That makes Kimi K3 open-weight rather than open-source in the strict sense. The distinction is practical. A startup that builds on the model and later grows past the thresholds could face obligations it did not plan for, and legal review of the specific numbers belongs before launch, not after. The analysis also matters for the wider debate over open model share, where open-weight and open-source releases are often counted together.