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Kimi K3 will cut its price to DeepSeek's level by mid-October (we give it 10% odds) — resolves 2026-10-15
Kimi K3 will cut its price to DeepSeek's level by mid-October (we give it 10% odds) — resolves 2026-10-15
Scheduled check 2026-10-15 · settled 2026-10-15
Background
The debate: Chinese model maker Moonshot priced its flagship Kimi K3 clearly above similar models, and outsiders are guessing whether it wants to make real money or is short of computing power and using price to hold down usage.
Why it matters: if it can hold the high price, the claim that open weights will inevitably push prices to the floor starts to crack.
Who is on each side: the camp expecting continued price cuts, versus our skeptical reading that this is rationing, not monetization.
The call
Kimi K3's blended effective price on Moonshot's official pricing page falls below $0.5/M tokens before 2026-10-15.
Sources behind the call
Moonshot AI (via HuggingFace)
“If the Licensee or any of its affiliates operates…”
ChinAI Newsletter (Jeff Ding, GWU)
“Using the blended rate (essentially, a typical…”
X / @natolambert (Nathan Lambert, Ai2/Interconnects)
“Kimi K3 license. It's inspired by MIT but…”
llm-stats.com + DevTk.AI + pricepertoken.com + Yotta Labs (independent price trackers, unaffiliated with Moonshot, ChinAI or Lambert)
“GLM-5.2 (via DeepInfra): Input $0.95/1M tokens…”
Moonshot AI (official pricing page)
“¥2.00 / MTok”
DeepSeek (official pricing page)
“1M INPUT TOKENS (CACHE MISS) $0.435”
The receipt
On 2026-10-15, read Moonshot's official pricing page and compute the blended effective price at the standard cache/input/output mix: below $0.5 is a hit; $0.5 or above is a miss.
Outcome
Miss (settled 2026-10-15)
The prediction: Kimi K3's blended price on Moonshot's official pricing page would fall below $0.5 per million tokens by October 15. How it would be checked, decided when the prediction was made: look at the official pricing page on October 15 and weight the cached-input, input and output prices 7:2:1. Below $0.5 means the prediction was right; $0.5 or more means it was wrong. On 2026-10-15 the official pricing page listed Kimi K3 at $0.30 for cached input, $3.00 for input and $15.00 for output per million tokens. Weighted 7:2:1, the blended price is $2.31, above $0.5. The price did not come down, so the prediction was wrong.