Kling 4.0 goes fully live: 30-second clips, up to 10 keyframes
Kuaishou put Kling 4.0 into full release on October 15: 30-second native generations, up to 10 keyframes, 8,000-token prompts, and no API yet.
On the evening of October 15, 2026, Kuaishou moved Kling 4.0 from limited preview to full release — the version the company promised for October back on September 29, now open to everyone instead of just annual black-gold subscribers. Kling is Kuaishou’s AI creation brand, and Kling 4.0 is its fourth-generation video model: 30 seconds in a single native generation, up to 10 keyframes, prompts of 8,000 tokens, and stereo audio generated alongside the picture.
Key points
- Single-generation length doubles from 15 seconds to 30; keyframes grow from Kling 3.0’s start-and-end pair to as many as 10 (Runware spec page; IT之家, October 16, writes 支持最多 10 张多关键帧输入).
- 4K is listed as an output alongside 720p and 1080p, and 21:9 is in the aspect-ratio row — what is marked coming soon is 10-bit HDR at 1080p and 4K, plus the 2-minute total via continuation. The enterprise/developer API has not opened either.
- Kuaishou (01024.HK) traded up more than 4% intraday on October 16, at HK$29.76 by 10:36 with HK$659 million turnover, against a Hang Seng Index up 0.9% (etnet 異動股, October 16).
Background
Kling 4.0 did not appear overnight. On September 29 Kuaishou announced it for October; the lighter Kling 4.0 Flash tier had already opened in limited early access a day earlier, on September 28, for black-gold and Ultra annual subscribers — 720p, 20 seconds and 8-bit SDR, built for fast draft iterations. Our September 29 digest carried both that announcement and ifanr’s hands-on with the preview build. Between October 6 and 11, Chinese media reported the follow-on story: Kling AI is being prepared for a separate Hong Kong listing of at least US$1 billion, underwriters have been picked, and one analysis put its valuation above RMB 100 billion. The capability line and the capital line converged on October 15.
The facts
| Item | Value | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Single generation | 3–30 seconds | Live |
| Continued multi-shot | Up to 2 minutes | Coming soon |
| Keyframe inputs | Up to 10 frames | Live |
| Reference assets | 10 images, 5 videos, 7 subjects (15 total) | Live |
| Prompt length | Up to 8,000 tokens | Live |
| Resolution | 720p, 1080p; 4K listed by Kuaishou’s spec | Live |
| Dynamic range | 10-bit HDR at 1080p and 4K, marked coming soon | Coming soon |
| Aspect ratios | 21:9, 16:9, 9:16, 1:1, auto | Live |
| Audio | Two-channel stereo; dialogue, effects and music | Live |
| Enterprise/developer API | “Coming soon” per Kuaishou | Not live |
| Flash tier | 3–20 seconds, 720p, 8-bit SDR | Limited access |
IT之家 (October 16, 08:22) carries the fullest spec list, but it contradicts itself on HDR: one line reads “4K、1080p 的 10-bit HDR 格式输出即将上线” (coming soon), another reads “支持 4K、1080p 的 10-bit HDR 格式输出” (supported). Runware gives HDR its own row, explicitly marked coming soon, while its resolution row reads “720p, 1080p, 4K” with no pending marker at all, and its intro and FAQ both say the launch includes “4K output”. So 4K resolution is a listed output on that page; only 10-bit HDR is pending. The disagreement is on the API side. UnificAlly splits its spec table into the vendor’s claim and what the platform actually exposes: the claim column reads “720p / 1080p / 4K” while its own column reads “720p (std) and 1080p (pro); 4K coming soon”. It also states that Kuaishou lists 4K and 10-bit HDR as coming soon, that neither is available on the API yet, that 4K requests still route to Kling 3.0 Omni, and — for any coming-soon mode — that “Anything marked ‘coming soon’ is Kuaishou’s own label and is not sold here.” So IT之家 and Runware list 4K, UnificAlly cannot serve it, and no third-party test has settled which side holds. Treat 4K as something you may not actually be able to pull.
Reference counts diverge too: IT之家 writes 10 images, 5 videos and 7 subjects, PingWest writes “最多 15 项素材”, and Runware writes “up to 15 assets: 10 images, 5 videos (30s combined), 7 subjects (3 from video), and voice”. The numbers reconcile — they just never get added up in the Chinese reports.
Pricing is the empty row. Kuaishou’s developer pricing page (kling.ai/dev/pricing) is JavaScript-rendered and returns no figures at all, so no official price for 4.0 exists to quote. Every concrete number in circulation is third-party. A hands-on blogger on X reports 1080p/30 s at about 450 credits (roughly RMB 16), 720p at about RMB 9, and Flash 720p/20 s at 120 credits — all his own measurements, not Kuaishou’s rate card. The aggregator UnificAlly lists $0.1908 per second at 1080p and $0.1269 at 720p, higher with a source video, with a 10% launch sale running to October 29. Treat both as estimates.
What others say
The date itself splits by nearly a day. PingWest writes “10 月 15 日晚，可灵 AI 的 Kling 4.0 正式全量上线” (evening of October 15). IT之家, filing at 08:22 on the 16th, says “昨晚” (last night). The hands-on X post shows 2:03 AM · Oct 16, 2026 with no timezone on the page and reads “今天，可灵 AI 在凌晨的时候，终于正式上线”. Etnet’s market note at 10:36 on the 16th says “可靈昨日上線”. The window is October 15 evening to October 16 early morning, and no official announcement page pins the exact moment — kling.ai shows “All-New Kling 4.0” as a purchasable product, but its release-history page is JS-rendered and yields no dated entry.
On positioning, PingWest reads the full release as Kuaishou deciding to absorb professional users’ pickiness: capabilities are organized around real production scenarios now — action, fights, complex camera moves, reference integration, targeted edits, on-screen ad copy, color grading and batch iteration. The same piece names the catch: professional work has a barrel effect, and a weakness in one stage can cancel gains everywhere else. MindStudio, testing 4.0 Flash in late September, was blunter. Lip sync held through a full exchange, spatial consistency passed, but Omni reference produced small physics misses (a candle that should have melted didn’t) and invented wardrobe details, performances read emotionally flat, and the verdict was “a solid incremental step forward” rather than a leap over rivals.
The market gave the bluntest reading of the day. Etnet’s 10:36 mover note on Kuaishou cites a 4.1% gain to HK$29.76 and attributes it to Kling 4.0 shipping the previous day, against the Hang Seng at 0.9% and the Hang Seng Tech Index at 1.6%. The same page’s closing price is HK$29.300 (+2.519%), so the intraday high did not hold to the close. That 4.1% is the only intraday figure we could verify; we found no independent confirmation of a larger move.
Our take
Thirty seconds and ten keyframes change what an ad or a short drama can hand to the model in one pass: a beat that used to need a 15-second cut and a stitch job can go end to end, and the extra keyframes do a lot of the transition-consistency work that used to be done by hand. The 8,000-token prompt is the underrated line — enough room to state character, camera, dialogue and scene detail once instead of splitting a brief across four generations and hoping the style survives.
Two items sit in the coming-soon column, and they are the ones that limit real work: 10-bit HDR at 1080p and 4K, and continuation to a 2-minute total — Runware writes “Up to 2 minutes in total (coming soon)”, so long-form narrative still has to fit inside a single 30-second pass, and Chinese reports that treat the 2 minutes as live are reading it wrong. On 4K, Runware and IT之家 list it as an output while UnificAlly’s platform column says it cannot serve it and routes those requests to Kling 3.0 Omni — one page each way, with no third-party evaluation to break the tie. Until someone tests it, don’t plan around 4K. The second gap is the API: enterprise teams and developers can only wait, and any price they see on an aggregator is a resale or measurement figure. If you are budgeting a project off those numbers, label them as estimates.
Where it lands in video tooling is visible from our other entries: SparkDiffusion’s 265x single-GPU acceleration addresses throughput for self-hosted inference, Tavus Griffin runs video-to-video in real time, and Kling 4.0 is fighting over how much of a story fits in one generation. The duration race has moved from preview to deliverable — but whether quality holds through the back half of a 30-second shot, and whether seven subjects in one reference pool contaminate each other, needs independent testing. No public leaderboard ranks Kling 4.0 against Seedance, Veo and Wan yet.
How to try it
Open kling.ai: the hero now reads “All-New Kling 4.0” with a Try Now button. The 4.0 Flash tier remains restricted to black-gold and Ultra annual subscribers, and enterprise API access awaits Kuaishou’s own announcement — there is no documentation to read yet.