A year ago, the best open-weight models trailed their proprietary counterparts by a wide margin. That gap has narrowed significantly increasing optionality for customers. Today, we're pleased to announce that Kimi K3 from Moonshot AI, the most advanced open-weight model, is available on Databricks. By offering native access to Kimi K3, together with top proprietary models from Anthropic, OpenAI and Google Gemini customers have maximum choice and control, and can build with confidence knowing the models are fully governed by Unity AI Gateway within their  secure Databricks perimeter. 

Kimi K3 is an open-weight model that delivers frontier-level quality on the enterprise tasks that matter most, at a fraction of the cost. For enterprises, this changes the calculus. Customers no longer have to choose between quality and control. Kimi K3 delivers state-of-the-art coding, agentic reasoning, and document understanding while giving you the deployment flexibility, cost efficiency, and customizability that open weights provide, all governed through Unity AI Gateway and comprehensive ZDR coverage.

Kimi K3 ranks #4 with a score of 57 in Artificial Analysis’ Intelligence Index placing it well above average against comparable models. Databricks evaluated Kimi K3 across our internal enterprise benchmarks. The headline: Kimi K3 consistently performs at the level of leading proprietary models, often at 50–70% lower cost per task.

Context, control, choice, and cost

Enterprise AI isn't just about picking the best model. It's about connecting that model to your data, governing how it's used, having the freedom to evolve your model strategy, and doing it all at a cost that scales. On Databricks, this comes down to four principles: context, control, choice, and cost.

Context: AI is only as good as the data it reasons over. On Databricks, Kimi K3 runs directly against your governed enterprise data through Unity Catalog. Your agents can query your lakehouse, access your feature stores, and ground their responses in your organization's actual knowledge, not generic training data. This is what turns a capable model into a capable enterprise model.

Control: Frontier-quality models need frontier-quality governance. Unity AI Gateway gives platform teams a single control plane across every model: fine-grained access permissions, safety guardrails on every request and response, complete audit trails logged to Unity Catalog, and spend controls that prevent runaway costs. The same governance policies you apply to proprietary models apply identically to Kimi K3. Invoke Kimi K3 via REST API:

Choice: The model landscape is evolving faster than any single vendor can keep up with. Databricks gives you the freedom to use the best model for each task without lock-in, across both open weight models such as Kimi 3 and proprietary models such as Anthropic Claude, OpenAI GPT, or Google Gemini. With Databricks intelligent routing across your entire model portfolio, users can easily combine Kimi K3 for cost-efficient coding with other models of different strengths, all through a single, standardized API. When a newer model emerges next quarter, you swap it in without rewriting a single line of application code.

Cost: Frontier quality no longer requires frontier pricing. Kimi K3 delivers 50–72% lower cost-per-task than comparable proprietary models, and Unity AI Gateway's Spend Controls let platform teams set budgets per user, team, workspace, and account with alerts before limits are hit. The Cost Analytics dashboard provides full visibility into spend by model, provider, and use case. The result: agentic workloads that were previously cost-prohibitive (coding agents running continuously, document pipelines processing millions of pages) become economically viable at scale.

Kimi K3 is a powerful proof point of this philosophy: an open-weight model that matches proprietary quality, deployed with enterprise governance, at a fraction of the cost, alongside every other model your organization uses — all on one platform.

Get started

Kimi K3 is available now, with US-hosting  on Databricks Foundation Model API with native access for AWS and GCP workspaces and ADI access for Azure Databricks. 

Try Kimi K3 in AI Playground: Explore the model's capabilities directly in your Databricks workspace with zero setup.

Configure Unity AI Gateway: Set up governance, cost controls, and model routing to add Kimi K3 to your existing model portfolio.

Build Kimi-powered agents with Agent Bricks: Analyze your data, automate complex work, evaluate with custom judges, and deploy at scale.

Contact your account team: For capacity requests, regional availability, or help designing your model routing strategy.