---
title: MoonshotAI (Kimi)
url: https://arcana.otnelhq.com/docs/providers/moonshotai
---

# MoonshotAI (Kimi)



MoonshotAI's Kimi K3 is a 2.8 trillion parameter open-weight multimodal reasoning model. It ranks #1 in multiple coding and agentic arenas, with a 1M token context window and strong performance on long-horizon tasks.




## Setup



```bash
# 1. Get your API key from https://platform.moonshot.cn/
export KIMI_API_KEY=sk-...

# 2. Verify detection
arcana doctor

# 3. Run
arcana run "hello"
```




## Available Models



| Model | Context | Best For |
| --- | --- | --- |
| `kimi-k3` | 1M | Flagship — coding, knowledge work, long-horizon agentic tasks |
| `coding-kimi-k3` | 1M | Coding-specialized variant, optimized for code generation |




## Highlights



- **#1 in coding arenas** — top-ranked on SWE-bench, Terminal-Bench, and web app development
- **1M token context** — analyze entire codebases, long documents, or multi-file refactors
- **Multimodal** — accepts text, images, and video input
- **Always-on reasoning** — deep thinking is enabled by default for complex tasks
- **Open-weight** — can be self-hosted for privacy-sensitive workloads




## Config File



```json
{
  "provider": "moonshotai",
  "model": "kimi-k3"
}
```




## Environment Variables



| Variable | Description |
| --- | --- |
| `KIMI_API_KEY` | Your MoonshotAI API key (required) |




## Via OpenRouter



You can also access Kimi K3 through OpenRouter with a single key:



```bash
export OPENROUTER_API_KEY=sk-or-...
# Then use kimi-k3 directly — Arcana routes through OpenRouter
```




## Pricing Notes



Approximate costs per 1M tokens via MoonshotAI API:



| Model | Input | Output |
| --- | --- | --- |
| kimi-k3 | $3.00 | $15.00 |
| coding-kimi-k3 | $0.24 | $0.88 |




## Tips



- `kimi-k3` excels at long-horizon coding tasks — give it entire repositories to work with
- `coding-kimi-k3` is much cheaper and great for everyday code generation
- Kimi K3's 1M context makes it ideal for analyzing large codebases or document sets
- Use `kimi-k3` as a strong alternative to Claude Opus for complex agentic work