Kimi K3.1 Pro weights deadline: no repo on Moonshot's Hugging Face

November 4 is the day Moonshot AI set for the Kimi K3.1 Pro open-weights release, and the promised repo is still missing. We checked the moonshotai Hugging Face org directly at about 04:20 UTC on Wednesday: no K3.1 Pro model, and a 2.8-trillion-parameter model's self-hosting plans sit on hold.

Key facts

• Moonshot's launch post commits: "Full model weights will be released by Nov 4, 2026" — the commitment stands on the page as of today, deadline day
• The moonshotai org's newest Hugging Face model is Kimi-K3, created June 13, 2026 — no K3.1 Pro repo as of our ~04:20 UTC check
• The only K3.1-named repo on Hugging Face is a third-party upload that is gated and holds two files: a README and .gitattributes, with zero bytes of model storage
• Kimi K3.1 Pro has been on the Kimi API since October 23 at $2.00/$10.00 per million input/output tokens, with cached input at $0.20
• Artificial Analysis scores the API model at 55 on its Intelligence Index, third among tracked models, behind Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 (58)
• Moonshot last shipped a headline open-weights drop on the exact promised day: the Kimi-K2-Thinking repo appeared on November 4, 2025, at 08:25 UTC

What happened

Moonshot AI launched Kimi K3.1 Pro twelve days ago as an API product with an unusual attached promise. The launch post states the 2.8-trillion-parameter mixture-of-experts model is "available today on Kimi.ai, Kimi Work, Kimi Code, and the Kimi API. The full model weights will be released by Nov 4, 2026." We covered the launch, its $2/$10 pricing, and its 55-point Artificial Analysis score in our October 24 article.

Today is November 4. The direct check is simple and reproducible: query the Hugging Face API for the moonshotai org, sorted by creation date. The newest model is Kimi-K3, created June 13, 2026, with 11,932 likes and 779,427 downloads. Nothing newer exists in the org, and a site-wide search for "kimi-k3.1" returns a single hit that is not the official drop.

That hit deserves a closer look, because it is the kind of repo that will trip up searchers today. audnai/penclaw-Kimi-K3.1-pro-unrestricted was created October 23 at 21:38 UTC, hours after the API launch, and carries 122 likes. Its file tree contains exactly two items, README.md and .gitattributes. The repo reports zero storage used, zero downloads, and a manual access gate, so even the README is not publicly readable. There are no weights in it. Anyone planning a download should wait for the official org, and treat "unrestricted" repos with the skepticism that word invites.

The deadline language itself has not changed. We re-fetched Moonshot's launch post this morning and the sentence "Full model weights will be released by Nov 4, 2026" is still on the page, unmodified. No blog post, changelog entry, or X statement announcing a delay has appeared in our checks.

Why it matters

The gap between an API product and downloadable weights is the whole business decision for self-hosters. Since October 23, Kimi K3.1 Pro has been a $2/$10-per-million-token black box: strong benchmark numbers from Moonshot's own harness and a 55 on Artificial Analysis' independent index, but no way to run it on your own hardware. If the weights land, that changes. If they slip, the model stays a hosted product, and every capacity plan built on the promise needs revisiting.

The market moved early on the assumption the weights would come. Within about a day of launch, the decentralized marketplace Surplus had a 22-offer order book for Kimi K3.1 Pro, with a listed best price of $0.11 per million input tokens against the $2.00 reference — figures from Surplus's own market page, not independently audited. Those sellers are currently serving the model through their own arrangements; independent weight availability would widen who can serve it at all. We covered the listing in our October 25 pulse.

Two verification points are attached to the eventual drop, whenever it comes. First, the license: Moonshot has announced no terms for the K3.1 Pro weights, and last month's open-weight releases split every which way, from Reflection's Beam shipping Apache 2.0 to MiniMax's community-license terms, as we noted in our Mistral Large 4 coverage. Commercial plans should wait for the actual license file. Second, the benchmarks: Moonshot's 65.7% Terminal-Bench 4.0 result is a vendor measurement, and it was produced by the API model. The released weights may differ, since Moonshot disclosed removing cyber-related training data ahead of the open release.

Background

Moonshot has honored a same-day weights promise before. The Kimi-K2-Thinking repo appeared on Hugging Face on November 4, 2025, at 08:25 UTC — one year ago today, and the same date now attached to K3.1 Pro. That history is the strongest argument against reading the missing repo as a broken promise: the company's launches have tended to follow Beijing-hours timing rather than UTC-morning timing, and 04:20 UTC is 12:20 in Beijing.

The wider context is an unusually dense stretch for open weights. Mistral shipped Large 4's open weights at the end of October after its own promised deadline, MiniMax released M31 Flash under a community license, and the pattern across all of them is the same one K3.1 Pro is testing: an API launch first, a weights commitment second, and a waiting period where builder decisions hang on whether the second half actually happens. If you are new to the distinction between API-only models and downloadable ones, our open-weights explainer covers what changes when you get the weights.

One structural fact keeps the stakes high: K3.1 Pro inherits Kimi K3's shape, 2.8 trillion total parameters with roughly 104 billion active per token across 896 experts. Self-hosting means multi-GPU or multi-node serving, so the buyers watching this deadline are providers, marketplaces, and well-resourced teams rather than laptop owners. Whether that class of buyer gets a new top-tier option today, tomorrow, or not at all is what the repo listing will tell us.

What's next

Three checks decide the day. The moonshotai org page is the first: a repo appearing there ends the watch, and the license file inside it is the immediate read. The second is whether Artificial Analysis re-scores the released weights at the same 55, since the cyber-data removal could move capability on security-adjacent tasks. The third is timing: Moonshot shipped K2 Thinking's weights at 08:25 UTC on its promised day last year, so the window on a same-day delivery runs well past the morning. If the day closes with no repo, the story changes from "deadline watch" to "silent slip," and we will say so.