In plain words
Kling is a tool for making videos with AI. It is both an app (on the web and on phones) and the family of AI models inside it. It was made by Kuaishou, a Chinese company best known for a short-video app.
You type a description, such as "a paper kite rising over a rooftop at sunset", or upload a photo you want to bring to life. The model then makes a short clip that matches, with movement, camera angles and, in newer versions, sound and speech.
This is text to video. Kling's models are built from the same ideas as Sora and other video generators: a diffusion model that starts from noise and refines it, step by step, into frames that look and move like real footage.
Everyday example
Describing a shot to a film crew
A director tells a crew: "Morning in a busy market, camera slowly moves past a chai stall, steam rising." The crew finds the place, sets the lights and shoots. With Kling, you give the same description, but there is no market and no camera: the model builds every frame from what it learned watching huge amounts of video.
Where the example breaks: A real crew films what is actually there. Kling invents everything, so hands, text and physics can come out wrong, and the result shows a scene that never happened.
How it actually works
Under the hood, Kling follows the pattern of most modern video generators.
Squeeze the video into a small code
A separate network, a 3D variational autoencoder, compresses video across width, height and time into a compact latent space. Working in that small space is far cheaper than handling every pixel.
Denoise with a transformer
The core is a diffusion transformer. It starts from random noise in the latent space and, guided by your prompt, removes noise over many steps until a coherent clip remains.
Attention across the whole clip
Kling uses full attention, so every part of every frame can look at every other part. That helps keep people and objects consistent through fast motion and big scene changes.
Decode, then add sound
The compressed result is decoded back into full frames. Since version 2.6 in December 2025, Kling can also generate matching audio, such as voices, sound effects and ambient noise, with the video.
- Made by
- Kuaishou Technology, Beijing, the company behind the Kuaishou short-video app
- First released
- June 2024, first as a test inside Kuaishou's KuaiYing video editing app in China
- Worldwide
- Global web access opened in July 2024
- What it makes
- Videos from text or images, plus images, lip sync and talking avatars
Realistic AI video can be misused to fake events. See deepfakes for how people try to spot them.
Questions people ask
Who owns Kling AI?
Kuaishou Technology, a Chinese short-video company, built Kling and still holds a majority stake. In July 2026 Kling's business was put into its own company and took money from outside investors, reported to include Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu.
Is Kling a Chinese app?
Yes. Kling was built by Kuaishou Technology in Beijing and is now run by a Kuaishou-controlled company, Beijing Keling Intelligent Technology. Its international website opened in July 2024. As with any AI video tool, read the terms on how your uploads and prompts are used.
Kling vs Sora: what is the difference?
Can Kling make videos with sound?
Yes, in newer versions. Kling added native audio with version 2.6 in December 2025. Kling 3.0 generates sound and speech across several languages, dialects and accents together with the picture, so you do not have to add a soundtrack separately.
How long can a Kling video be?
It depends on the version. Kling 3.0, in February 2026, made clips of up to 15 seconds in one go. Kling 4.0, in October 2026, raised that to 30 seconds. Longer videos are built by extending or joining clips.
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