Every open-weights date an AI lab has set since July was met: five promises, five kept, after a median wait of 12 days

Since July, AI labs have named a date for a model's open weights five times at launch, and kept all five, after a wait of 0 to 25 days from the API launch, 12 days at the median. Moonshot made two of the five promises and delivered both 12 days after launch.

THE FIVE DATED PROMISES

Kimi K3 (Moonshot): live on its API July 15; Moonshot said the weights would ship July 27; uploaded July 27. 12 days. Step 5 Preview (StepFun): live September 20; StepFun set October 15 at launch; released October 15. 25 days. Beam (Reflection AI): announced October 5 with Apache 2.0 weights promised that month; weights and API both arrived October 16. 0 days after the API, 11 after the announcement. Mistral Large 4 (Mistral): public preview on its API October 6; weights promised by the end of October; released October 29. 23 days. Kimi K3.1 Pro (Moonshot): live October 23; weights promised by November 4; public November 4. 12 days.

NO DATE GIVEN

Ling 3.1 Flash (Ant Group): live September 30 with weights promised 'soon'; on Hugging Face October 13. 13 days. MiniMax M3.1 Flash (MiniMax): live October 19 with weights to be 'released later'; the repository's first files went up October 23. 4 days. Hy4 (Tencent): out of preview November 4, and Tencent says it plans to open-source the weights; no Hy4 repository on Tencent's Hugging Face page yet. The preview's weights have been there since late August.

WEIGHTS ON DAY ONE

Thinking Machines' Inkling (July 15), Meta's Muse Spark Open (October 15, gated behind Meta's license approval) and DeepSeek's V4.1 Flash 1017 checkpoint (October 17) put the weights out the day the model went live, and so did Inkling-Small (July 30).

HOW WE COUNTED

Launch is the day the model went live on its maker's API, from the ArtificialWatch registry. Weights is the first commit of the files to the lab's Hugging Face repository, from that repository's commit history. A repository can be uploaded privately and made public later, so where we saw the public date ourselves we use it: Kimi K3.1 Pro was uploaded November 2 and made public November 4. Kimi K3 is the one close call. Its repository history puts the upload on July 27, the promised day, and our own story first reported the weights public on July 28. The promises are the labs' own words at launch, as our stories quoted them at the time.

WHAT WE LEFT OUT

Open models whose weights timing we did not record when they launched, including GLM-5.3, DeepSeek V4, GLM-5.2 and MiniMax M3, and release dates that were never the lab's own promise, such as a Moonshot researcher's July word that K3.1 would come in August (it shipped October 23).