OpenAI adds Kimi K3 to retain enterprise customers

OpenAI has added Moonshot’s Kimi K3 to its enterprise platform through Baseten, giving existing business customers a way to use the Chinese model as a foundation model without renegotiating vendor agreements. The move keeps customers inside OpenAI’s contracting and billing environment while Baseten hosts the model, manages traffic and handles inference compute.

Kimi K3 is described as comparable to leading models from Anthropic and OpenAI, while being cheaper for enterprise users and developers. Engineering teams are expected to use it for repetitive coding tasks that consume large volumes of tokens, lowering costs while continuing to operate under OpenAI contracts.

The arrangement also highlights a retention risk for OpenAI. Developers can migrate directly from OpenAI to Kimi by swapping two single lines of code and replacing OpenAI API keys with Kimi credentials, making it easy to leave once existing contracted tokens are used.

Cost comparisons sharpen the pressure. OpenAI offers a 50% discount for cached re-reads, described as about $1.25, while Moonshot’s discount is 90%, for a net cost of 30 cents. In the example cited, a company running 5,000 automated coding tasks would spend $14,000 for the month using ChatGPT, versus just over $6,000 per month with Moonshot, an immediate 56% savings.