Kimi-K3

📰  Tech Blog |     📄  Full Report

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 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; all remaining scores are from the official DeepSWE leaderboard, 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); Claude Opus 4.8 and Claude Fable 5 with Terminus 2 (Artificial Analysis); GPT-5.5 and GPT-5.6 Sol with Codex (OpenAI).
   • ProgramBench. Kimi K3 is evaluated with the Kimi Code harness. The GLM-5.2 score is from the GLM-5.2 release blog; all other scores are from Vals AI.
   • 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. Our evaluation is based on an H20-calibrated branch of the official tasks 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. 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 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 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 im