Kimi K3 trails frontier US models by a wide margin on cyber exploits, and distillation may explain why

The British AI Security Institute and the U.S. Center for AI Standards and Innovation tested Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 on offensive cyber tasks. Kimi K3 scored 32 percent on ExploitBench, while leading U.S. models achieved 76 percent, indicating a significant performance gap. Additionally, its safeguards failed to block exploit development or simulated attacks. The results highlight the disparity between Kimi K3's strong general benchmark scores and its weaker cybersecurity performance, supporting allegations that Moonshot AI distilled Anthropic's models. This gap suggests that Moonshot AI faces considerable challenges in the cybersecurity domain.