What is Kimi? — AI Glossary

What it is: Kimi is the AI assistant from Moonshot AI, a Chinese AI lab. It’s best known for one of the longest context windows in production — capable of handling entire books, long codebases, or massive document sets in a single conversation.
Who it is for: Researchers, lawyers, analysts, and anyone who works with very long documents or complex multi-file projects.
Best if: Your work involves long-context tasks where most other AI assistants run out of context and lose track of the early parts.
Skip if: You don’t work with long documents — the context-window advantage doesn’t show up in short conversations. Want one practical AI workflow every morning? Subscribe to our free daily newsletter.

What is Kimi?

Kimi is the AI assistant developed by Moonshot AI, a Chinese AI company founded in 2023 by Yang Zhilin. The product is known mostly for one reason: its context window — the amount of text the model can hold in mind at one time — is among the largest of any production AI in 2026, with versions supporting 1 million to 2 million tokens.

Why does Kimi matter?

That makes Kimi well-suited to tasks where other assistants run out of room: analyzing a 1,500-page contract, reasoning over a whole novel, querying a multi-year archive of meeting transcripts, or holding an entire mid-size codebase in active memory.

Kimi was the first widely available AI to demonstrate that million-token-plus context could actually retrieve specific facts from anywhere in the document at high accuracy. Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic have since matched or exceeded this on their flagship models, but Kimi pioneered the capability at scale.

How do you use Kimi?

Kimi is free to use at kimi.com (an international version is available alongside the original Chinese product). Moonshot AI also offers Kimi via API for developers at competitive per-token pricing.

While most consumers in the West stick with ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini, Kimi is worth knowing if your workflow regularly involves very long inputs. Many lawyers, researchers, and policy analysts have added Kimi to their stack specifically for long-context tasks.

Related terms

• Context Window
• Token
• DeepSeek
• Large Language Model

Learn more on Beginners in AI

• Kimi (Moonshot AI) — Site Coverage

Sources and further reading

• Kimi — official product
• Moonshot AI — company

Last reviewed: May 2026. AI terminology evolves quickly — verify specifics on the official source pages above.

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• Kimi (Moonshot AI) — Site Coverage
• Context Window
• Token
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• Large Language Model
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