A custom license, not a standard SPDX license
The Kimi K3 weights are distributed under the Kimi K3 License, a custom license with no standard SPDX identifier. OpenK3 describes K3 as an open-weight release for this reason rather than assigning it a standard open-source license label.
The license text is published in the repository at the audited revision, and it is the only authoritative statement of the terms. This article is an informational summary, not legal advice, and reading the full license before use is essential.
What the license permits
The license permits use, modification, distribution, sale, deployment, fine-tuning, and the creation of derivative works. These permissions are subject to conditions, including retaining the copyright notice and complying with applicable laws.
Because the permissions are conditional, the phrase commercial use allowed is incomplete on its own. The next section covers the two threshold-based conditions that determine when additional obligations apply.
Two conditional commercial-use thresholds
If the Licensee or its affiliates operates a Model-as-a-Service business and aggregate revenue exceeds 20 million US dollars over any consecutive 12-month period, a separate agreement with Moonshot AI is required before any commercial use.
Commercial products or services with more than 100 million monthly active users or more than 20 million US dollars in monthly revenue must prominently display Kimi K3 on the user interface. These are separate thresholds with separate obligations.
Exceptions and warranty
The requirements in Sections 2 and 3 do not apply to internal use or to use through Moonshot AI's official products or certified inference partners. Whether a specific deployment fits an exception depends on its circumstances and the full license text.
The license is provided AS IS with no warranty. OpenK3 does not determine whether a particular company, hosted service, derivative model, or affiliate structure complies with the license.
What the license leaves unanswered
The license does not provide official GPU, VRAM, or minimum hardware requirements, and the 118-file, approximately 1.56 TB repository does not directly reveal runtime memory needs. Compliance questions and deployment questions are separate problems.
OpenK3 has not downloaded the complete repository, checked every shard, or performed local inference, so this summary makes no compatibility or deployment-success claim. For any decision with legal or commercial consequences, read the full license and consult a qualified professional.