On November 4, 2026, Moonshot AI is scheduled to do something no lab has done before: hand the public the complete weights of a 2.8-trillion-parameter AI model that independent testing currently ranks as the strongest open model in the world. Kimi K3.1 Pro has been live through Moonshot's apps and API since October 23, but the downloadable release — the one that lets anyone outside Moonshot run, inspect, fine-tune and redistribute the model — is still a promise with a date on it. We checked Moonshot's Hugging Face organisation while writing this article: there is no K3.1 Pro repository yet. The newest thing there is still the older Kimi K3. So this is the guide to read before the drop: what exactly is landing, the licence question that will decide what "open" really means here, the terabyte-scale hardware reality, the two controversies hanging over the release, and a checklist for the day itself.…