Roboflow

Kimi K3 Overview

Kimi K3 is a sparse Mixture-of-Experts large language model developed by Moonshot AI, with 2.8 trillion total parameters and a 1-million-token context window. The model activates 16 out of 896 experts per token using the Stable LatentMoE framework, and is built on two architectural innovations: Kimi Delta Attention (KDA), a hybrid linear attention mechanism that enables up to 6.3x faster decoding in long-context settings, and Attention Residuals (AttnRes), which selectively retrieves representations across model depth and delivers roughly 25% higher training efficiency. Together with refined training and data recipes, these structural advances yield approximately 2.5x better overall scaling efficiency compared to its predecessor Kimi K2. The model applies quantization-aware training from the supervised fine-tuning stage onward, using MXFP4 weights with MXFP8 activations for hardware compatibility. Thinking mode is always enabled at launch, with reasoning effort configurable via the reasoning_effort field.

Kimi K3 supports native visual understanding alongside text, accepting image inputs for tasks that combine software engineering and visual reasoning. It targets long-horizon coding, knowledge work, and agentic workflows, and ships in two variants: K3 Max for general chat and agent tasks, and K3 Swarm Max for large-scale parallel processing across many coordinated sub-agents. The model is compatible with the OpenAI SDK via an OpenAI-compatible API. Full model weights are scheduled for release by July 27, 2026 under a Modified MIT license, following the open-weight pattern established by the Kimi K2 model family. A technical report with full architecture, training, and evaluation details is expected to accompany the weights release.

Kimi K3 Interactive Demo

Model settings

Thinking level

Max output tokens

Default 65,536 · max 65,536

Sign in to adjust thinking and output length per run.

Results appear here. Add an image or pick an example to run Kimi K3.

Kimi K3 Details & Performance

Details

Resources

—

Vision Tasks

CaptioningChart Question AnsweringClassificationDocument Question AnsweringImage TaggingMulti-Label ClassificationOCRObject DetectionVision LanguageVisual Question Answering

Features

Foundation VisionLLMs with Vision CapabilitiesMultimodal Vision

Usage

Past 30 Days

Performance

Avg. Latency

Kimi K3 Vision Evals

Vision Evals is Roboflow's ground-truth benchmark: every model runs the same real-world samples across five vision tasks, and answers are scored against ground truth.

Evals updated October 13, 2026Pricing updated October 15, 2026

Overall score#43 of 63
56.0%
Avg cost / sample#40 of 63
$0.0058
Avg speed / sample#26 of 63
9.86s
Avg tokens / sample
3.7K

Strengths and weaknesses

Kimi K3 averages 56.0% across the five Vision Evals tasks, ranking #43 of 63 models overall.

Its weakest relative showing is Counting, ranking #53 of 63 at 46.0%.

At $0.0058 per sample it is the 40th cheapest of the 63 benchmarked models, and its average inference time of 9.9s per sample makes it the 26th fastest.

Performance profile

Field medianKimi K3

Field medians: Object Detection 54.4%, Counting 63.5%, Identification 84.4%, OCR 63.6%, Reasoning 57.6%.

Results by task

TaskScoreField (0 to 100)RankCost / sampleSpeed
Object Detection
51.9%
#36 of 63$0.01023.23s
Counting
46.0%
#53 of 63$0.00086.12s
Identification
81.3%
#45 of 63$0.00085.21s
OCR (low)
58.6%
#33 of 47$0.00616.35s
Single value
43.0%
Transcription
75.1%
Structured JSON
78.1%
Text localization
39.3%
OCR (high)
61.8%
#29 of 47$0.03236.90s
Single value
43.9%
Transcription
80.4%
Structured JSON
82.9%
Text localization
43.4%
Reasoning (low)
42.4%
#44 of 63$0.00084.51s
Reasoning (high)
74.2%
#17 of 50$0.03379.92s
  • Thinking longer helps: 3.2 points higher on ocr at high effort for 5.2x the cost and 5.8x the latency.
  • Thinking longer helps: 31.8 points higher on reasoning at high effort for 41.2x the cost and 17.7x the latency.

Price vs. performance

Score vs. cost

Overall benchmark score against estimated cost per sample, on a log scale. Upper-left is the sweet spot: high quality at low cost.

62 models on the current benchmark · scores and efficiency pooled across all five tasks at low effort · Kimi K3 highlighted

Kimi K3 scores are from a single run per task; a three-run re-run under the current protocol is pending · Methodology

View all Vision Evals →

Kimi K3 Pricing

Kimi K3 costs $0.450 per 1M input tokens and $15.00 per 1M output tokens.

Input$0.450 / 1M tokens
Output$15.00 / 1M tokens
Cached input$0.280 / 1M tokens

Pricing updated Oct 15, 2026

Alternatives to Kimi K3

Other models worth comparing for similar use cases.

Qwen
Qwen3.8 Max
Qwen3.8 Max is the flagship tier of Alibaba's Qwen3.8 family, a sparse mixture-of-experts multimodal model with roughly 2.4 trillion total parameters of which about 95 billion activate per token, which keeps serving cost and latency well below what the total parameter count would imply. It builds on the architectural foundation established by Qwen3.5 and accepts text, images, video, and documents as input while producing text output. Reported context handling reaches close to one million tokens, with a maximum generation length of 131,072 tokens, so the model is aimed at long-horizon agentic work such as repository-scale coding, multi-step research, data analysis, and office document workflows.For vision work the model performs image and video understanding, document and chart interpretation, text recognition inside images, and grounded visual question answering, and Alibaba reports gains concentrated in multimodal and agentic evaluation categories rather than general reasoning. Published figures include 86.6 on Terminal-Bench 2.1, 67.7 on SWE-bench Pro, 93.0 on PaperBench, 82.8 on IFBench, and 92.6 on GPQA Diamond. It is the first model in the Max tier of the Qwen line for which the team states weights will be released publicly, alongside a smaller Qwen3.8 27B checkpoint. No training or safety model card has been published.
OpenAI
GPT-6.1 Sol
GPT-6.1 Sol is a reasoning model in OpenAI's GPT-6 series that accepts text and image input and returns text. It is an upgrade to GPT-6 Sol positioned to approach the intelligence of the larger GPT-6 Astra model on agentic coding, computer use, and professional knowledge work. The model exposes an adjustable reasoning effort control, ranging from low settings for simple turns to maximum settings for harder tasks, and can be driven with tool use enabled or disabled. It operates over a context window of roughly one million tokens and emits up to 128,000 output tokens in a single response, which supports long-running agent loops over large codebases and multi-document collections. Audio and video inputs are not supported.On the visual side, the model is evaluated on GDP.pdf, a benchmark that asks professional questions about complex PDF documents containing tables, charts, diagrams, and fine-print details, and on OSWorld 2.0, which measures agents operating graphical computer applications. OpenAI reports that GPT-6.1 Sol performs on par with or better than GPT-6 Sol across its image input safety evaluations, and that the share of responses containing a factual error at low reasoning effort falls from 11.4 percent to 7.7 percent.
Anthropic
Claude Opus 5.5
Claude Opus 5.5 is a proprietary multimodal reasoning model from Anthropic and the first entry in the Claude 5.5 family. It accepts interleaved text and image input and returns text, with a one million token context window and up to 128,000 output tokens per response. Adaptive thinking is always enabled on this model and cannot be disabled; thinking depth is instead governed by an effort parameter with five levels, where medium is the default, a change from the high default used by Claude Opus 5 and earlier Opus models. Anthropic reports a knowledge cutoff of June 2026.On the visual side, Anthropic characterizes Opus 5.5 as its strongest Opus release for vision and computer use, describing improved reading of dense documents, charts, screenshots, and diagrams for document extraction and visual analysis tasks. Published results include 89.0% on Chartography with tools and 81.8% on OSWorld 2.0 under partial credit scoring, alongside 48.7% under strict scoring reported in the system card. The accompanying system card states that Opus 5.5 scored higher than Opus 5 on every evaluation in its capability summary, with the largest gains concentrated in agentic coding, visual reasoning, computer use, and long-horizon knowledge work. The model ships with safety classifiers covering biology and cybersecurity that can route blocked requests to earlier Claude models.
Google
Gemini 3.1 Pro
Gemini 3.1 Pro is a proprietary multimodal model from Google’s Gemini 3 series, released in early 2026 and designed for advanced reasoning across large multimodal datasets. It accepts text, images, audio, video, and documents, supporting up to a 1-million-token input context with up to 64k output tokens. Compared with Gemini 3 Pro, it improves long-context synthesis and multi-step reasoning, enabling more reliable analysis of large documents, datasets, and software codebases.The model also advances visual understanding and grounding, allowing it to interpret UI screenshots, diagrams, and real-world scenes while referencing specific regions within images or video. These capabilities make Gemini 3.1 Pro well suited for multimodal workflows involving document processing, interface analysis, robotics research, and complex visual reasoning.
Meta
Muse Spark 1.3
Muse Spark 1.3 is a proprietary multimodal reasoning model from Meta Superintelligence Labs and the fourth Muse Spark release in five months, arriving on September 2, 2026. It takes text, images, video, and document files as input and returns text, and it operates over a context window of 1,048,576 tokens. Meta trains the model for long-horizon agentic work, so it carries accumulated context and prior tool results forward across many turns, reconciles messy or conflicting inputs, and asks for clarification when a task is underspecified. Visual inputs such as screenshots and video clips feed a reasoning loop that runs against a real execution environment rather than a scripted sequence of steps.The model exposes graded reasoning effort settings. An xhigh configuration is generally available at launch, while a max reasoning configuration aimed at harder reasoning and agentic problems arrives after further safety testing. Artificial Analysis measures Muse Spark 1.3 (max) at 62 on its Intelligence Index and the xhigh configuration at 61, with agentic tool-use evaluations driving most of the gain over Muse Spark 1.2; max reaches 52% on Tau3-Bench Banking by spending more turns and reasoning tokens than xhigh. Prior Muse Spark versions emit bounding box coordinates, transcriptions, and structured field extractions from images on Roboflow Vision Evals.
Grok
Grok 4.7
Grok 4.7 is a proprietary multimodal reasoning model from SpaceXAI that accepts images alongside text and returns text-only output. On visual inputs it supports image captioning, visual question answering, OCR, document and chart question answering, and image classification and tagging, with all results expressed as generated text rather than bounding boxes or masks. Its 500,000 token context window leaves room for several images, long documents, or extended conversations about visual content in a single request.The model exposes a configurable reasoning effort setting with low, medium, high, and xhigh levels (high by default), letting callers trade latency for the amount of deliberation spent on a prompt, including multi-step questions about an image. Built on a larger base model than Grok 4.6 with extended reinforcement learning on harder tasks, it works longer on difficult problems and checks its own work more carefully at the same serving speed. SpaceXAI's launch materials focus on coding and agentic knowledge work and report no image benchmark results.

Deploy Kimi K3 with an API

Kimi K3 runs as a hosted REST endpoint through Roboflow Workflows. Pick a task, then hand the prompt to your coding agent or copy the code. Deploying the workflow into a free Roboflow workspace replaces the your-workspace and YOUR_API_KEY placeholders with your own.

Connect your agent to Roboflow (once)

Add the Roboflow MCP server

claude mcp add --transport http roboflow https://mcp.roboflow.com/mcp

Run /mcp and authorize Roboflow in your browser when the OAuth flow opens.

Start a new Claude Code session so the MCP loads, then paste the prompt below (it works the same in any agent).

Deploy this workflow to your Roboflow workspace to use it.

Integrate the Roboflow "Kimi K3" workflow into my app.

- Endpoint: POST https://serverless.roboflow.com/<your-workspace>/workflows/kimi-k3-object-detection
- Auth: send my Roboflow API key as `api_key` in the request body, read from the ROBOFLOW_API_KEY env var (never hardcode).
- Body: { "api_key": ..., "inputs": { `image`: { type: "url" | "base64", value }, `classes`: string array } }.
- Billing: this workflow needs no provider API key — inference runs on my Roboflow credits. A BYO provider key can be added to the model step in the Roboflow workflow editor later.

With the Roboflow MCP connected, call `workflows_get` on "kimi-k3-object-detection" to read the exact input schema (the source of truth), then `workflows_run` on a sample image to confirm the output shape before writing code (the MCP is authenticated, so this needs no key). Without the MCP, use the contract above.

Before running the app, set up these keys so it does not error at runtime:
- `ROBOFLOW_API_KEY` (sent as `api_key`) from https://app.roboflow.com/settings/api
Create a .gitignore'd .env with these variables, using placeholder values for any I haven't given you. Then pause and tell me directly, in your reply: the full path to the .env file, exactly which keys I need to paste in, and the link to get each one. Wait for me to confirm I've added them before you run anything. Do not run the app until I confirm.

Then add the integration to my codebase: match my project's language, framework, and conventions; read every key from environment variables (never hardcode); add basic error handling; and include a small runnable example. If you can't tell what language my project uses, ask me.
Installpip install inference-sdk

Deploy this workflow to your Roboflow workspace to use it.

# Inference runs on your Roboflow credits — no provider API key needed. To bill your own provider account instead, add an api_key to the model step in the Roboflow workflow editor.
# 1. Import the library
from inference_sdk import InferenceHTTPClient

# 2. Connect to your workflow
client = InferenceHTTPClient(
  api_url="https://serverless.roboflow.com",
  api_key="YOUR_API_KEY"
)

# 3. Run your workflow on an image
result = client.run_workflow(
  workspace_name="your-workspace",
  workflow_id="kimi-k3-object-detection",
  images={
    "image": "YOUR_IMAGE.jpg"  # Path to your image file
  },
  parameters={
    "classes": ["class1", "class2", "class3"]
  },
  use_cache=True  # cache workflow definition for 15 minutes
)

# 4. Get your results
print(result)

Deploy this workflow to your Roboflow workspace to use it.

// Inference runs on your Roboflow credits — no provider API key needed. To bill your own provider account instead, add an api_key to the model step in the Roboflow workflow editor.
const response = await fetch('https://serverless.roboflow.com/your-workspace/workflows/kimi-k3-object-detection', {
  method: 'POST',
  headers: {
    'Content-Type': 'application/json'
  },
  body: JSON.stringify({
    api_key: 'YOUR_API_KEY',
    inputs: {
      "image": {"type": "url", "value": "IMAGE_URL"},
      "classes": ["class1", "class2", "class3"]
    }
  })
});

const result = await response.json();
console.log(result);

Deploy this workflow to your Roboflow workspace to use it.

# Inference runs on your Roboflow credits — no provider API key needed. To bill your own provider account instead, add an api_key to the model step in the Roboflow workflow editor.
curl --location 'https://serverless.roboflow.com/your-workspace/workflows/kimi-k3-object-detection' \
--header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
--data '{
  "api_key": "YOUR_API_KEY",
  "inputs": {
    "image": {"type": "url", "value": "IMAGE_URL"},
    "classes": ["class1", "class2", "class3"]
  }
}'

Kimi K3 License

Modified MIT · Permissive license, with added terms

Kimi K3 ships under a modified MIT license: MIT's permissive core with vendor-specific clauses layered on top. The Kimi K3 license is permissive in outline, but the added clauses are where commercial restrictions hide.

Commercial use
Usually permitted without a separate commercial license, though the added clauses can restrict it — named-user caps, industry carve-outs, or scale thresholds are common. Confirm against the Kimi K3 license text.
Modification
Permitted under the MIT core, subject to whatever the modified terms add. Derivative works may inherit the same additions.
Redistribution
Permitted with attribution, and the modified terms must travel with every copy you distribute.

Uncertainty around licensing can delay or stop a project. Diff the Kimi K3 terms against stock MIT, and read any acceptable-use policy attached to them, before you build on the model.

Read the full Modified MIT license ↗

Do I need a commercial license for Kimi K3?

If the added clauses rule out your use case, you need a commercial license from the rights holder. Roboflow's licensing page lists the models whose commercial license is included in a Roboflow plan, and which deployment methods it covers — Kimi K3 is worth checking against that list before you commit.

Do not hesitate to reach out with questions for your commercial project — our team will help you start solving business problems on the first call. See Roboflow commercial licensing for the models included in each plan.

Talk to sales

This model is released under a modified version of the MIT License. The base permissions of MIT apply, but additional terms or restrictions have been added by the model authors.

Commercial use is generally permitted, but the modified terms may add restrictions specific to this model. Review the full license text before deploying commercially.

License information is provided as a guide and is not legal advice.

Frequently Asked Questions About Kimi K3 Vision

Yes. Kimi K3 accepts image input and handles OCR, object counting, identification, visual reasoning, and object detection. On Roboflow's Vision Evals its strongest task is OCR at 58.6% (#33 of 47 at low effort). You can test it on your own image in the demo above.

Yes. it scores 58.6% (#33 of 47 at low effort) on Vision Evals OCR, which covers single readings, full transcriptions, structured JSON, and locating text with boxes. Within that, full transcriptions score 75.1%, and returning the fields of a label or form as JSON scores 78.1%.

Not its strength. On Vision Evals, Kimi K3 scores 51.9% mAP@50 on object detection (#36 of 63 at low effort) and 46% judge-graded accuracy on object counting. For production counting or precise localization, pairing it with a specialized detector like RF-DETR or your own trained model in a Roboflow Workflow is usually more reliable: detect the objects, then count the detections.

On our benchmark's task mix, Kimi K3 averages $0.0058 per sample at $0.45 per 1M input and $15.00 per 1M output tokens (#40 of 63 on cost), with an average speed of 9.9s per sample across the benchmark. Actual cost depends on your images and prompts.

On the overall Vision Evals ranking, Kimi K3 sits #43 of 63 at 56%, just behind Qwen3.5 9B (56%) and just ahead of GLM 5.3 Flash (55.8%). See the full side-by-side: Kimi K3 vs Qwen3.5 9B.