Perplexity has quietly dropped one of the most consequential model additions to its platform in months: Kimi K3 is now available inside both Perplexity and Perplexity Computer for Pro and Max subscribers. The move brings a frontier-class Chinese open-weight model into one of the most widely used AI search products in the US -- and Perplexity is making a pointed promise about where your data actually lives.

The model behind the headline

Kimi K3 is the flagship release from Beijing-based Moonshot AI, and its specs are hard to ignore. It is a 2.8-trillion-parameter Mixture-of-Experts model with native vision and a 1-million-token context window. To put that in perspective, Kimi K3 is roughly 75 percent larger than DeepSeek's V4 Pro, which sits at approximately 1.6 trillion parameters.

It is the world's first open-source model in the 3-trillion-parameter class, designed for frontier intelligence scenarios including long-horizon coding, knowledge work, and reasoning. The architecture leans on two internal innovations: Kimi Delta Attention, a hybrid linear attention mechanism, and Attention Residuals, which the company describes as a drop-in replacement for residual connections that delivers consistent scaling gains. In plain terms, these techniques help information flow more efficiently through very long sequences without the usual degradation that plagues large models.

It is suited for complex coding, knowledge work, and long-horizon agentic workflows, and is particularly strong at navigating large repositories, using tools, debugging, and iterating against images, logs, tests, and runtime feedback. K3 also ships with always-on reasoning -- you cannot turn it off, but you can dial down the reasoning effort with a reasoning_effort flag set to low, high, or max (default).

Where Perplexity fits in

Perplexity is not just a chat interface. Perplexity Computer runs multi-step workflows across research, coding, design, and deployment from a single prompt, routing tasks across 20 specialized models and connecting to 400+ applications. Kimi K3 now joins that model roster, giving Computer a new option for the heavy-lifting tasks where its 1M context window and coding chops shine most.