Kimi

There are two things to consider: whether you need an agent that delivers a finished file, and whether you are comfortable with an English interface.

Who it is for. For people working with long documents and presentations: upload a hundred-page report, get a summary, and request slides by morning. The free plan is enough to see whether this is your tool, and the site opens from Russia without preparation.

Who else. For people who want a strong model for free: at launch, Kimi K3 ranked third in the Artificial Analysis index after Claude Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol (17.07.2026), while ranking first among open models in its class (AA card, 02.09.2026), and it is available in chat at no cost.

Who it is not for. For people who need a Russian interface: the site is in English or Chinese, and its Russian responses are weaker than its English ones. Also not for anyone planning to pay with a Russian card: it will not work, and the agent swarm is available only on paid plans.

A good fit: section 3 takes you from sign-in to your first task. Choosing between it and DeepSeek: the comparison is in section 7.

What vibecoding isStarting from scratch: how to set tasks for agents with no coding experience

Three levels: regular chat, an agent that creates files, and an agent swarm for large tasks.

Chat. A question, web search, or review of an uploaded file or image. Two response modes, fast Instant and thoughtful High, plus a context window of up to one million tokens, meaning several thick books in one conversation. One million is available from the Allegro plan; the free plan has a shorter context window.

Agent. Describe a task in words, and Kimi creates the result as a file: a presentation, a spreadsheet with formulas, a document, a report of ten thousand words, or a working website. The vendor lists more than twenty tools for the agent and connects financial-data plugins such as Wind and S&P Global.

Swarm. For a large task, the main agent breaks it down and assigns it to up to 300 copies of itself, which work in parallel and take up to 4,000 steps. The vendor promises results 4.5 times faster than one agent. The swarm is available from the Moderato plan, where the limit is more modest than in the ads: from 2 subagents on Moderato to 8 on Allegro; the free plan gets the regular agent.

Kimi Work and Kimi Code. Desktop Kimi Work edits files directly on your computer: in the official video, it receives an Excel financial model and rewrites it using an annual report. Kimi Code lives in terminals and code editors, from VS Code to Cursor, and its source code is open.

What was actually done. In official footage: McKinsey-style slides on fusion energy, a voxel 3D game from one sentence, and a website clone from a video recording. On Habr, a practitioner deployed a website in Yandex Cloud and configured Kubernetes through K2.5, and all experiments cost 81.77 ₽ through the API (29.01.2026). We have not tested Kimi on a task ourselves; the figures come from official demos and third-party tests.

The product has two addresses, and only one of them is needed from Russia.

You can use it from Russia. Open kimi.ai: this is the international version, and it serves the page normally from Russian IP addresses, which we checked from nodes in Moscow and St. Petersburg on 02.09.2026. The address kimi.com is for China, where sign-in is only through WeChat or a phone with the +86 code, and the site itself redirects foreigners to kimi.ai.

Step 1. Ask your first question without registering: the chat responds anyway, and sign-in is only needed for history and synchronization.

Step 2. To save history, sign in through a Google account. The +7 code is not listed among countries (checked 02.09.2026), and there is no email sign-in button in the window.

Step 3. Switch to the agent: Slides, Docs, Sheets, Websites, and Deep Research buttons are directly under the input field. Start the first task with the result name: "create a 10-slide presentation based on this PDF."

Apps. iPhone: App Store, where it is available in the Russian storefront. Android: Google Play, official package com.moonshot.kimichat; RuStore has a February 2026 build without Russian. The website distributes desktop apps for macOS and Windows; full Kimi Work runs on Macs with Apple silicon.

In Russian. Write in Russian, and it will respond in Russian. The website interface is in English; Russian is already in the language list in the iPhone app.

Steps verified 02.09.2026 using live kimi.ai and kimi.com sign-in windows, the vendor help center, and the T-J guide

Three signals align: the model is strong, the audience is large, and demand in Russia is alive.

Artificial Analysis index. At launch, Kimi K3 scored 57 points and ranked third after Claude Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol, level with Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.5 (17.07.2026), while its index task cost $0.94 versus $1.80 for Opus 4.8. By 02.09.2026, the live Artificial Analysis model page shows 60 points for K3 max mode and first place out of 111 among large models with open weights. The first open model in its class, but not the overall leader.

Vendor claims. Vendor claims. On the model's GitHub card (captured 02.09.2026): GPQA Diamond 93,5, DeepSWE 67,5, BrowseComp 91,2. There is no independent reproduction; practitioners on Habr explicitly complain about the lack of third-party benchmarks, so treat these figures as self-reported.

Audience. Audience. The latest official figure is old: founder Yang Zhilin reported 36 million monthly active users in December 2024, while third-party 2026 snapshots show a decline and fourth-to-eighth place in the Chinese market behind Doubao and DeepSeek. Similarweb counted 60,1 million visits to kimi.com over the three months ending in July 2026, rank 852 worldwide, with 42 % of traffic from China.

Demand in Russia. “Kimi” is searched 133 thousand times per month, “kimi neural network” 17 thousand times, and “kimi k3” 26 thousand times (Wordstat, 02.09.2026). Kimi's place among the assistants in our catalog is shown below the card title, and the full tool ranking is on the main page.

You do not have to pay for chat and the agent; payment is for parallelism, the swarm, and file storage.

Free entry. The Adagio plan provides K3 chat and an agent: one task at a time, two projects, two schedules, 500 MB. It does not include Swarm or Kimi Code.

Paid tiers. From $19 per month for Moderato to $199 for Vivace, from $15 with annual billing. You cannot buy now: as of 02.09.2026, the pricing page has a notice about new plans, separating Kimi and Kimi Code into individual subscriptions, and every paid-plan button leads to a waitlist.

Paying from Russia. Russian cards do not work, and charges are in dollars. The usual options are a foreign card, an intermediary with a fee, or an App Store gift card for an in-app purchase. Details are in the explainer how to pay for AI services from Russia.

For developers. The API costs $3 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens; cached context repeats cost $0,30. There is no free tier, and the minimum top-up is $1. The three subscriptions are separate: chat, Kimi Code, and API do not pay for one another.

Three questions: where your data is stored, what the model refuses to discuss, and how much to trust its answers.

Data in China. Moonshot AI is registered in Beijing, and kimi.com's footer lists Chinese ICP registration numbers. The full privacy-policy text has not been fully reviewed, so the practical rule is simple: do not upload contracts, personal data, or trade secrets to the chat, as with any foreign service.

Censorship. The only independent run found, ellamind's test across 168 topics sensitive to the PRC, gave Kimi K2.5 two failures, while DeepSeek V3.2 failed 136. This is one source with an unverified methodology; Western press, however, reports built-in topic controls in all Chinese models.

Answers need fact-checking. In Russian, the model invents errors that were not in the text, and a practitioner rated its stock forecast “at the level of a first-year student.” Reports and slides look polished even with incorrect figures, so verify the numbers.

What else to know. In summer 2026, the head of the White House science office accused Moonshot of training K3 on Claude Fable 5 answers, which is called distillation. No evidence was presented; researchers object that two weeks passed between the releases of Fable and K3. The company removes old models from the API without a transition period: k2.5 has returned an error since 31.08.2026.

The choice is not “who is smarter,” but “what output do you need.”

Different workflows. DeepSeek is stronger at coding and math and remains a chat: question, answer. Kimi handles long documents and ready-made files: slides, tables, websites, and reports produced by a swarm of agents, while desktop Kimi Work edits files directly on the computer.

Different entry barrier. DeepSeek allows email registration; Kimi requires a Google account because it does not accept Russian phone numbers. Both open from Russia, and neither can be paid for with a Russian card.

Who else is nearby. ChatGPT remains the second benchmark: a Plus subscription costs $20 per month and is not available directly from Russia.

Over three years, a long-context chat became an agentic work environment, while models have moved toward open access with each generation.