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Kling 4.0 launches, and the 4K 10-bit HDR it was announced with is still listed as coming soon

Kuaishou put out two separate press releases on October 16, one headlining a two-minute video extension, neither carrying a price, an API date or a comparative score.

By Daniel Ochoa · 17 October 2026

Kuaishou launched Kling 4.0 on October 16, 2026, closing out an October release window it set on September 28. The model is real and generally available, but the two specifications that carried the original announcement are not: 10-bit HDR output at 4K and 1080p is described in the company's own launch release as something Kling 4.0 "will soon support," and API access for enterprise customers and developers is also written in the future tense. Neither of the two press releases Kuaishou issued that day contains a price, a credit rate or a single comparative benchmark number.

What is actually live: 30 seconds, 10 keyframes, 8,000-token prompts

The launch material groups the upgrade into three areas: steadier motion and complex camera work, native 30-second generation for continuous takes, and support for up to 15 reference assets plus 10 keyframe inputs for frame-level control over characters and scene transitions. Prompt input length now runs to 8,000 tokens. Camera handling gets specific attention, with push-ins, pull-outs, pans, trucking shots, tracking shots and orbit shots named as areas where shot-size changes and transitions were improved. Kling 4.0 also accepts reference videos, including white-model and depth-map clips, to guide performance, camera movement and pacing, and it has been wired into Kling MCP and CLI so agents can call keyframe-to-video and Omni Reference.

Camera control is one of the categories we score, and it is the one claim in this release that a benchmark can actually settle. Here is where the previous generation sits in our own testing.

Two releases, two different headline claims

Kuaishou published the launch twice on October 16, roughly eight hours apart. The 06:53 ET release, issued from Beijing under the Kling AI name, leads on native 30-second generation and says the model has served more than 100 million users and more than 50,000 enterprise customers. The 14:50 ET release, issued from Hong Kong under Kuaishou Technology, carries a section headed around "15 Reference Assets, 10 Keyframes and Video Extension of up to Two Minutes." The two-minute extension appears only in that second document, and it is presented as part of the Omni Reference feature rather than as a generation length, so the longest single pass the company commits to in either release is still 30 seconds.

The reference numbers in that same section do not reconcile either. Omni Reference is described as supporting "up to a total of 15 references, including up to 10 images, 5 videos and 7 subjects." Those sub-limits add up to 22 against a stated cap of 15, which means the per-type figures are ceilings that cannot all be used at once, something the release does not explain.

Pricing is the part nobody has published

Three weeks ago the available product was a 720p Flash tier for a limited group of subscribers, with the full model promised for October without a date. That part has now been delivered. What has not moved is cost. No per-second rate, credit cost or API price appears in either launch release, so the only Kling numbers that can be compared against anything today are the ones attached to the previous generation.

Until the API opens, buyers are comparing a model with no published rate against Kling 3.0 and its competitors, on the strength of adjectives. The release calls the output "professional-grade" and talks about greater latitude for color grading in high-contrast, backlit and neon scenes, which is exactly the kind of claim 10-bit HDR would support, and exactly the feature that has not shipped yet.

Sources: Kling AI, Kuaishou Technology, Kling 4.0 feature page.

Daniel Ochoa: Covers model launches, shutdowns and pricing changes as they happen. Reads deprecation notices for a living so you do not have to.