Moonshot AI launches Kimi Hosted Agents, a managed service for running AI agents in the cloud

Moonshot AI formally launched Kimi Hosted Agents on November 5, 2026, a cloud service that runs AI agents for enterprises and developers without requiring them to build or maintain the underlying infrastructure. The announcement was made on the company's developer platform, the Kimi API Open Platform, and reported the same day by outlets including TechInAsia.

What Kimi Hosted Agents does

The service packages the so-called agent harness — the operational layer that manages sessions, tool execution, sandboxes and failure recovery — as a managed product. In practice, Moonshot now operates the environment the agent works in: persistent sessions with full history, tools running in isolated cloud sandboxes, automatic retries, task scheduling and resumption after a platform failure, in the same state as before the interruption.

For multi-agent work, a coordinator agent can delegate subtasks to up to 20 agents in child threads within the same session, with synchronous or asynchronous delegation. According to Moonshot, the service includes more than 140 skills and more than 30 plugins — from web retrieval and professional data queries to office-document processing and content generation — and 12 official agent templates, including eight for finance and others for game development, player advising, SRE incident response and Discord community operations.

Pricing is usage-based and combines three components: sandbox runtime at ¥0.072 per hour (about one US cent), inference charged at the selected model's token rates, and plugins charged per call. The launch formalizes a service that had been in beta since September 2026 for enterprise-verified users in China — and, for now, the offering is aimed first at the Chinese market, via platform.kimi.com.

The launch comes in the same week Moonshot published the open weights of Kimi K3.1 Pro, a 2.8-trillion-parameter model: first the company opened the model, now it sells the managed environment to run it. It is a move that brings Moonshot closer to rivals that already offer hosted agent runtimes, with one stated difference — the company sells the harness itself, not just access to the model.

Image credit: screenshot of the Kimi chatbot interface (K2 generation), by VulcanSphere, via Wikimedia Commons, in the public domain.

Sources

Transparency note: this article was produced with the assistance of artificial intelligence, cross-checked against public posts on X and sources on the internet. Always consult the original sources to confirm the details.

By Muse