# Kimi K3 URL: https://interfaze.ai/models/moonshotaikimi-k3 Kimi K3 by moonshotai, a image-text-to-text model with multimodal capabilities. Understand and compare multimodal features, benchmarks, and capabilities. ## Comparison | Feature | Kimi K3 | Interfaze | | --- | --- | --- | | Input Modalities | text, image, video | image, text, audio, video, document | | Native OCR | No | Yes | | Long Document Processing | Yes | Yes | | Language Support | unknown | 162+ | | Native Speech-to-Text | No | Yes | | Native Object Detection | No | Yes | | Guardrail Controls | No | Yes | | Context Input Size | 1M | 1M | | Tool Calling | Yes | Tool calling supported + built in browser, code execution and web search | ### Scaling | Feature | Kimi K3 | Interfaze | | --- | --- | --- | | Scaling | Self-hosted/Provider-hosted with quantization | Unlimited | [Try Interfaze](https://interfaze.ai/dashboard)[Read the Docs](https://interfaze.ai/docs) View model card on [Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/moonshotai/Kimi-K3) ## 1\. Model Introduction Kimi K3 is an open-weight, native multimodal agentic model and our most capable model to date. It is a 2.8T-parameter model built on Kimi Delta Attention (KDA) and Attention Residuals (AttnRes), with native vision capabilities and a 1-million-token context window. It is the world's first open 3T-class model, designed for frontier intelligence across long-horizon coding, knowledge work, and reasoning. ### Key Features - **New Architecture**: Kimi K3 is built on Kimi Delta Attention (KDA) and Attention Residuals (AttnRes), and scales up MoE sparsity with a Stable LatentMoE framework that activates 16 out of 896 experts — yielding an approximate 2.5× improvement in overall scaling efficiency over Kimi K2. - **Long-Horizon Coding**: Operating with minimal human oversight, Kimi K3 sustains long engineering sessions, navigates massive repositories, and orchestrates terminal tools — from GPU kernel optimization and compiler development to vision-in-the-loop game dev, CAD, and even chip design. - **Agentic Knowledge Work**: Kimi K3 advances end-to-end knowledge work, producing deep research with interactive visualizations, widgets and dashboards, and motion design and video editing, powered by its native multimodal architecture. - **Native Multimodality & Long Context**: Kimi K3 understands text, images, and video within the same model, and supports a 1-million-token context window. - **Open Frontier Weights**: We release the full Kimi K3 model weights under the Kimi K3 License, making frontier intelligence openly available for research, deployment, and further innovation. ## 2\. Model Summary ## 3\. Evaluation Results All Kimi K3 results are obtained with reasoning effort set to 'max' and temperature = 1.0. For single-step tasks, such as GPQA Diamond, HLE-Full, and vision benchmarks without tools, we set top-p = 0.95; for agentic tasks, we set top-p = 1.0. For HLE-Full, MMMU-Pro, CharXiv (RQ), MathVision, and ZeroBench, each cell reports the scores without and with tool augmentation (general tools for HLE-Full, Python for the vision benchmarks), in that order. 1. **Reasoning & knowledge benchmarks** - **CritPt and AA-LCR.** Scores are cited from [Artificial Analysis](https://artificialanalysis.ai/) as of July 23, 2026. 2. **Coding benchmarks** - **DeepSWE.** Kimi K3 is evaluated with the Kimi Code harness. The GLM-5.2 score is taken from the [GLM-5.2 release blog](https://z.ai/blog/glm-5.2); all remaining scores are from the official [DeepSWE leaderboard](https://deepswe.datacurve.ai/), under which Kimi K3 attains 67.3 with the mini-SWE-agent harness. We report the DeepSWE v1.1 tasks. - **Terminal-Bench 2.1.** Kimi K3 is evaluated with the Kimi Code harness. For all other models, we report the best score across harnesses: GLM-5.2 with Claude Code ([GLM-5.2 release blog](https://z.ai/blog/glm-5.2)); Claude Opus 4.8 and Claude Fable 5 with Terminus 2 ([Artificial Analysis](https://artificialanalysis.ai/evaluations/terminalbench-v2-1)); GPT-5.5 and GPT-5.6 Sol with Codex ([OpenAI](https://openai.com/index/previewing-gpt-5-6-sol/)). - **ProgramBench.** Kimi K3 is evaluated with the Kimi Code harness. The GLM-5.2 score is from the [GLM-5.2 release blog](https://z.ai/blog/glm-5.2); all other scores are from [Vals AI](https://www.vals.ai/benchmarks/programbench). - **SWE-Marathon.** Kimi K3, Claude Opus 4.8, and Claude Fable 5 are evaluated with the Claude Code harness; GPT-5.6 Sol is evaluated with the Codex harness. The GLM-5.2 score is from the [GLM-5.2 release blog](https://z.ai/blog/glm-5.2). Our evaluation is based on an H20-calibrated branch of the [official tasks](https://www.swe-marathon.org/) as of July 9, 2026, prior to the final v1.1 release: the Docker images, performance gates, and reference oracles for the GPU tasks have been recalibrated for H20, while the correctness and anti-cheat validators remain unchanged. Additionally, Claude Fable 5 hit fallbacks on 35% of the tasks in our evaluation, which may have negatively impacted its measured performance. - **FrontierSWE.** Kimi K3 is evaluated with the Kimi Code harness and GPT-5.6 Sol with the Codex harness; all other results are from [FrontierSWE](https://www.frontierswe.com/). Dominance scores are recomputed from the raw scores using the official evaluation script and are current as of July 16, 2026. - **PostTrainBench.** Scores for GLM-5.2, GPT-5.5, and Claude Opus 4.8 are adopted from the official [PostTrainBench](https://posttrainbench.com/) results. Kimi K3, Claude Fable 5, and GPT-5.6 Sol are evaluated with the official Harbor implementation at maximum reasoning effort, averaged over three runs on H20 GPUs (instead of H100 in the official setting) — Kimi K3 and Claude Fable 5 with the Claude Code harness, and GPT-5.6 Sol with the Codex harness. - **MLS-Bench-Lite.** Kimi K3 is evaluated with the Kimi Code harness; GLM-5.2 and the Claude models with the Claude Code harness; GPT-5.5 and GPT-5.6 Sol with the Codex harness. - **SciCode.** Scores are cited from [Artificial Analysis](https://artificialanalysis.ai/) as of July 23, 2026. - **Kimi Code Bench 2.0 (in-house).** Kimi K3 is evaluated with the Kimi Code harness (it attains 73.7 with the Claude Code harness); GLM-5.2, Claude Opus 4.8, and Claude Fable 5 with the Claude Code harness; GPT-5.5 and GPT-5.6 Sol with the Codex harness. All models are evaluated at maximum reasoning effort, except GPT-5.5, which uses the "xhigh" setting. As the benchmark includes cybersecurity and safety-related tasks, we also disclose the fraction of refused or fallback tasks: Claude Fable 5 hit 13 fallbacks and 1 refusal out of 80 tasks; 10 refusals out of 80 tasks entered GPT-5.6 Sol's cyber guard; GPT-5.5 had 3 refusals out of 80 tasks. 3. **Agentic benchmarks** - **OfficeQA Pro.** Each test case provides the agent with the entire PDF corpus, with all PDFs rendered as images and no machine-readable text available. - **OfficeQA Pro and SpreadsheetBench 2.** Kimi K3, GLM-5.2, Claude Opus 4.8, and Claude Fable 5 are evaluated with the Claude Code harness; GPT-5.5 and GPT-5.6 Sol are evaluated with the Codex harness. - **MCP-Atlas.** All models are evaluated on the 500-task public subset with a 100-turn limit, using Gemini 3.1 Pro as the judge. - **AutomationBench.** All models are evaluated on the 600-task public subset, following the official GitHub setup in all other respects. - **BrowseComp.** We adopt a context-compaction strategy triggered at 300K tokens. When evaluated with the full 1M-token context window and no context management, Kimi K3 achieves a score of 90.4. The results of Claude Fable 5, Claude Opus 4.8, GPT-5.6 Sol, and GPT-5.5 are cited from [Anthropic](https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-fable-5-mythos-5) and [OpenAI](https://openai.com/index/gpt-5-6/). - **GDPval-AA v2, AA-Briefcase, τ³-Banking, Harvey Lab-AA, and APEX-Agents.** Scores are cited from [Artificial Analysis](https://artificialanalysis.ai/) and the [APEX-Agents leaderboard](https://www.mercor.com/apex/apex-agents-leaderboard/) as of July 23, 2026. For Harvey Lab-AA, we report the criterion pass rate. - **CorpFin v2, Finance Agent v2, and Legal Research Bench.** Scores are cited from [Vals AI](https://www.vals.ai/). - **Agents' Last Exam.** Scores are cited from the [official leaderboard](https://agents-last-exam.org/leaderboard) as of July 23, 2026; we report the leaderboard's primary pass-rate metric. On the leaderboard, each model is paired with a specific harness: Kimi K3 with Kimi Code; GPT-5.6 Sol and GPT-5.5 with Codex; Claude Fable 5, Claude Opus 4.8, and GLM-5.2 with Claude Code. † The Claude Fable 5 entry runs at xhigh effort with 40% of tasks annotated as downgraded. 4. **Multimodal benchmarks** - Except for ZeroBench, which follows the official setting and is run five times, all multimodal scores are averaged over three runs. MMMU-Pro is evaluated following the official protocol, preserving the original input order and prepending images to the text input. - **PerceptionBench** is an in-house benchmark that focuses on atomic visual perception capabilities. ## 4\. Native MXFP4 Quantization Kimi K3 applies quantization-aware training from the SFT stage onward, using MXFP4 weights with MXFP8 activations for broad hardware compatibility. ## 5\. Deployment > \[!Note\] You can access Kimi K3's API on [https://platform.kimi.ai](https://platform.kimi.ai) by selecting `kimi-k3`, and we provide OpenAI/Anthropic-compatible API for you. Currently, Kimi K3 is recommended to run on the following inference engines: - [vLLM](https://github.com/vllm-project/vllm) — see [recipes](https://recipes.vllm.ai/moonshotai/Kimi-K3) - [SGLang](https://github.com/sgl-project/sglang) — see [cookbook](https://docs.sglang.io/cookbook/autoregressive/Moonshotai/Kimi-K3) - [TokenSpeed](https://github.com/lightseekorg/tokenspeed) — see [recipes](https://lightseek.org/tokenspeed/recipes/models#kimi-k3) * * * ## 6\. Model Usage Kimi K3 always has thinking enabled, and will return `reasoning_content`. Thinking effort is configured with the top-level `reasoning_effort` request field, which supports `"low"`, `"high"`, and `"max"` (default `"max"`). Kimi K3 was trained in the preserved thinking history mode. For multi-turn conversations and tool calls, Kimi K3 requires the complete assistant message returned by the API to be passed back to `messages` as-is — including `reasoning_content` and `tool_calls`, not just `content`: ``` import openai def chat_with_preserved_thinking(client: openai.OpenAI, model_name: str): messages = [ { "role": "user", "content": "Tell me three random numbers." }, { "role": "assistant", "reasoning_content": "I'll start by listing five numbers: 473, 921, 235, 215, 222, and I'll tell you the first three.", "content": "473, 921, 235" }, { "role": "user", "content": "What are the other two numbers you have in mind?" } ] response = client.chat.completions.create( model=model_name, messages=messages, stream=False, max_tokens=4096, reasoning_effort="max", ) # the assistant should mention 215 and 222 that appear in the prior reasoning content print(f"response: {response.choices[0].message.reasoning}") return response.choices[0].message.content ``` For full guides and examples (vision input, structured output, partial mode, tool choice, dynamic tool loading, context caching), see the [Kimi K3 Quickstart](https://platform.kimi.ai/docs/guide/kimi-k3-quickstart) and [Thinking Effort](https://platform.kimi.ai/docs/guide/use-thinking-effort). ### Coding Agent Framework Kimi K3 works best with [Kimi Code CLI](https://www.kimi.com/code) as its agent framework. We warmly invite you to give it a try — run Kimi Code in your terminal and select Kimi K3 using the `/model` command. We hope you enjoy building with Kimi K3, and we would love to hear your feedback! * * * ## 7\. License Both the code repository and the model weights are released under the [Kimi K3 License](https://huggingface.co/moonshotai/Kimi-K3/blob/main/LICENSE). * * * ## 8\. Contact Us If you have any questions, please reach out at [support@moonshot.ai](mailto:support@moonshot.ai). ## Want more deterministic results? [Try Interfaze](https://interfaze.ai/dashboard)[Read the Docs](https://interfaze.ai/docs)