Kling AI 4.0: 30-second takes, 4K, and a parent worth less than it is

Kling 4.0 went live worldwide on 15 October. It makes 30 seconds in one pass, twice the length of version 3.0, takes up to 10 keyframes placed anywhere on the timeline and up to 15 reference assets, and writes out 4K with two-channel stereo. A lighter Flash build does 20 seconds at 720p for people who iterate before they commit.

Who it is for

The audience is already large. Kling says it serves more than 100 million users and over 50,000 enterprise customers in advertising, film, television and gaming, and Adobe is bringing the models into Firefly. That mix tells you who the service is for: an agency shooting a product spot it cannot afford to film, a studio blocking out a scene before the crew arrives, a game team filling a trailer.

“We're excited to expand that choice with Kling's newest models coming soon to Firefly.”

— Meg Donovan, Senior Director, Adobe

Kling comes from Kuaishou, China's second-largest short-video platform, which had been collecting video long before generative models existed. Under the hood it is a diffusion model with a transformer backbone and a 3D autoencoder that compresses space and time together, which is where its one visible strength comes from. The service launched in June 2024, and you can see that strength with your own eyes in the motion: where rival models break anatomy two seconds in, Kling more often carries a take to the end.

The money behind it

The business grew faster than its parent. Kling booked RMB 850m in the second quarter, more than triple a year earlier, after RMB 650m in the first, for RMB 1.5bn across the half. Kuaishou's whole second quarter came to RMB 35.5bn, up 1.4%, with adjusted net profit down 30% to RMB 3.9bn.

Those two lines do not sit well together. Kling added at least RMB 567m of revenue year on year, and the entire company added about RMB 490m. Everything else Kuaishou sells, taken together, shrank while the video model paid for the difference.

Investors priced that in. Kling raised $3bn at an $18bn post-money valuation, while Kuaishou's whole Hong Kong listing closed Friday at HK$29.30, around $15.7bn. The subsidiary carries a valuation 15% above the listed parent that owns it.

What the plans really cost

The pricing has one trap worth knowing before you sign up. The free tier hands out 66 credits a day with no rollover, which is 1,980 a month if you log in daily — three times the 660 on the $10 Standard plan. They expire within 24 hours, so you can sample the model every day and still never bank enough for one long render. Native 4K opens at the $37 Pro tier, and the credit price slides from 1.52 cents on Standard to 1.15 on the $92 Premier, the same shape we found when we took apart Suno's credits.

So: worth paying for if you need a long take that holds together, and specifically the Pro tier if 4K is in the brief. Our Kling AI card carries the plans with the date they were checked, and the video generation shortlist puts it next to the alternatives.

Informational material, not investment advice. Prices and plan contents were checked on 12 October 2026 and market figures on 19 October, and both move faster than any catalogue.