July 17, 2026

Gemini 3.5 Pro Misses July 17 as Moonshot Ships Kimi K3, the Largest Open-Weight Model Ever

Google's frontier target came and went with no launch, Bloomberg reporting a delay and a Google spokesperson confirming 3.5 Pro is still in testing. Moonshot AI shipped Kimi K3 at 2.8 trillion parameters and $3/$15 per million tokens. The July 17 Tinker rate hike landed, but it spared Inkling.

Gemini 3.5 Pro's July 17 target passed with no launch, and Google finally acknowledged it is not ready

The date this beat has tracked for ten days, July 17, arrived today and Gemini 3.5 Pro did not ship. Bloomberg reported Thursday that Google is delaying the model to keep improving it, particularly in coding, and a Google spokesperson confirmed to Yahoo Tech that the company is "currently testing 3.5 Pro, an upgraded Flash model, and other models with partners." No new date was given. That is the shift from two days ago, when the target was unconfirmed and Google had said nothing: the target has now expired, and Google is on the record that the model is not finished.

The public Gemini API pricing page still lists no gemini-3.5-pro row, no model card, no API ID. The only frontier Google actually sells is Gemini 3.5 Flash at $1.50/$9 per million tokens with a 1M context, plus the older Gemini 3.1 Pro at $2/$12. Every Gemini 3.5 Pro spec in circulation, the 2M context window, the Deep Think reasoning layer, the roughly $15/$60 estimate, traces to leaks and unnamed sources, never a Google announcement. The model has now missed three external targets in a row: June, July 17, and beyond.

The stopgap signal is the part worth watching. TechTimes reports that Google DeepMind has registered the names Gemini 3.6 Flash and Gemini 3.5 Flash Light, and the same spokesperson volunteered that an "upgraded Flash model" is in partner testing. A Flash-tier release with a higher version number than the Pro that has not shipped would be a quiet admission that the Pro timeline is long. Treat the name registrations as rumor, but if a new Flash lands before 3.5 Pro, that is the tell. A stronger Flash checkpoint has been circulating on LM Arena since early July under no label.

For production work today, Gemini 3.5 Flash, GPT-5.6 Terra, and Claude Fable 5, free in paid subscriptions through Sunday, are the available options in this capability class. Stop treating July 17 as a plan.

Kimi K3: 2.8 trillion parameters, $3/$15, and the largest open-weight model ever shipped

While Google held back, Moonshot AI released Kimi K3 on July 16, a 2.8-trillion-parameter mixture-of-experts model that the Alibaba-backed Beijing lab calls the largest open-weight system ever built. It activates 16 of 896 experts per query, accepts text, image, and video input, and carries a full 1,048,576-token context window, according to MarkTechPost's architecture breakdown.

The pricing is the part that fits this tracker. Moonshot's K3 rate card lists $3 per million input tokens on a cache miss, $0.30 per million on a cache hit, and $15 per million output, with reasoning tokens rolled into the output price. Those rates are flat across the entire 1M context window, with no long-context premium, a contrast with Google and OpenAI tier surcharges above 200K. Built-in web search runs $0.015 per call. The API is OpenAI-SDK compatible at api.moonshot.ai/v1 with model ID kimi-k3, and the reasoning_effort parameter currently accepts only max.

Where it lands competitively: Moonshot says K3 leads on BrowseComp, SWE Marathon, and OmniDocBench but trails Claude Fable 5 on FrontierSWE and HLE-Full, so it is competitive with the top proprietary systems in VentureBeat's reading, not a clean win. At $15 per million output it sits level with GPT-5.6 Terra and far under Fable 5's $50, as the chart below shows. Moonshot's lineup is now three tiers: K3 as the $3/$15 flagship, K2.7 Code at $0.95/$4, and K2.6 at $0.95/$4.

Open weights are the open question. Moonshot has put every prior Kimi on Hugging Face under a modified MIT license, but as of July 16 the K3 weights were not yet public. SiliconANGLE and VentureBeat report the full weights are scheduled for release on July 27. When they land, K3 will top the open-weight parameter chart ahead of DeepSeek V4-Pro at 1.6T and Inkling at 975B. Until then the API, OpenRouter, and the free Kimi consumer app are the only ways to run it. A launch top-up promotion returns 10 to 30 percent in bonus credits on prepaid balances through August 11.

The July 17 Tinker rate hike landed, and it did not touch Inkling

Yesterday's issue framed July 17 as the day Thinking Machines' Tinker rates rise roughly 50 percent. That hike is real and it took effect today, but the Tinker Models and Pricing page shows it spared the model it was most easily attached to. The page's "Old / New (Effective July 17)" columns list identical old and new prices for every Inkling row: $1.87 input, $0.374 cached, $4.68 output, and $5.61 train at the 64K tier, and the doubled $3.74 / $9.36 / $11.23 at 256K. Inkling's limited-time launch discount holds. DataCamp confirms the carveout directly: "while Tinker is increasing prices for most models on July 17, Inkling's rates are shielded from this hike."

The hike hit the rest of the Tinker catalog. Nemotron-3-Ultra output rose from $4.15 to $6.225 per million, Kimi-K2.6 from $3.66 to $5.49, Qwen3.5-397B from $5.00 to $7.50, DeepSeek-V3.1 from $2.81 to $4.215, GPT-OSS-120B from $0.44 to $0.84, and Qwen3-8B from $0.40 to $0.60. Train rates rose about 10 percent across the same set. The practical consequence, per Beam's pre-hike analysis, is that reinforcement-learning workloads that sample constantly take the worst hit, because the 50 percent jump lands on the sample line, not the train line.

If you are fine-tuning or running inference on Inkling through Tinker, your cost basis is unchanged today. If you are on any of the third-party models Tinker hosts, your per-token bill just went up. The fine print that matters on a platform-wide hike is per-model: check the Old and New columns row by row before you assume a specific model moved.

Current prices: what the frontier costs today, July 17

Rates are per 1M tokens, US API list price, each linked to the vendor's official pricing page. Dates are the rate's effective date.

• GPT-5.6 Sol, $5 in / $30 out, 1.05M ctx. OpenAI, Jul 9.
• GPT-5.6 Terra, $2.50 in / $15 out, 1.05M ctx. OpenAI, Jul 9.
• GPT-5.6 Luna, $1 in / $6 out, 1.05M ctx. OpenAI, Jul 9.
• Claude Fable 5, $10 in / $50 out, 200K ctx, free in paid subs thru Jul 19 then credits. Anthropic, Jul 13.
• Claude Opus 4.8, $5 in / $25 out. Anthropic, May 28.
• Claude Sonnet 5, $2 in / $10 out, intro thru Aug 31, then $3/$15 plus a roughly 30% tokenizer lift. Anthropic, Jun 30.
• Gemini 3.5 Flash, $1.50 in / $9 out, 1M ctx. Google, May 19.
• Gemini 3.1 Pro, $2 in / $12 out, rises to $4/$18 above 200K, 1M ctx. Google, current.
• Grok 4.5, $2 in / $6 out, 500K ctx. xAI, Jul 8.
• Kimi K3, $3 in / $15 out, $0.30 cache hit, flat across 1M ctx. Moonshot, Jul 16.
• DeepSeek V4 Pro, $0.435 in / $0.87 out, off-peak baseline, peak doubles, 1M ctx. DeepSeek, current.
• Inkling (Tinker), $1.87 in / $4.68 out, $0.374 cached, 64K ctx, 256K doubles. Thinking Machines, Jul 15, held.
• Mistral Large 3, $0.50 in / $1.50 out, Apache 2.0. Mistral, current.
• Meta Muse Spark 1.1, $1.25 in / $4.25 out, $0.15 cached, 1M ctx. Meta, Jul 9.

The countdown: cliffs and deadlines

• Fable 5, July 19, Sunday, 2 days. Included subscription access for Pro, Max, Team, and premium Enterprise ends at 11:59:59 PM PT, the third extension in five weeks. After that, every Fable token draws from usage credits at $10/$50. Anthropic has given no forward commitment past July 19, and the deadline has moved at the wire each time, so watch Sunday. Anthropic.
• Opus 5 / Honeycomb, rumor. Still unconfirmed. A claude-opus-5 string was reportedly spotted on Google Vertex AI Model Garden on July 14, and r/ClaudeAI chatter ties a launch to the Fable 5 cutoff, per kie.ai and we0.ai. Neither Anthropic nor Google has confirmed anything, and the model does not appear in Anthropic's public API. The current Opus flagship remains Opus 4.8 at $5/$25.
• DeepSeek V4, mid-July launch pending, 7 days to legacy retire. The DeepSeek pricing page still shows only baseline off-peak rates, V4 Pro $0.435/$0.87 and V4 Flash $0.14/$0.28, with no peak-pricing row active, so the official launch has not landed. The peak-hour doubling, 9 to 12 and 14 to 18 Beijing time, starts with that launch. The legacy deepseek-chat and deepseek-reasoner aliases retire July 24 at 15:59 UTC, routing to V4 Flash. If you are migrating, the off-peak window, 1 to 4 AM and 6 to 10 AM UTC, is when the current rates hold.
• OpenAI July 23 deprecation, 6 days. The wave retires gpt-5-chat-latest, gpt-5.1-chat-latest, five Codex variants, computer-use-preview, and the deep-research models. The base gpt-5.4 model is not on the deprecations page.
• Sonnet 5, September 1, 7 weeks. Intro $2/$10 ends and standard $3/$15 begins, and the new tokenizer emits roughly 30 percent more tokens, putting the effective rate near $3.90/$19.50, above Sonnet 4.6's $3/$15. Anthropic.
• Kimi K3 open weights, July 27, 10 days. The 2.8T checkpoint lands on Hugging Face if Moonshot holds to its stated schedule, which would reframe the open-weight leaderboard.