US and UK testers set Kimi K3 loose on a fake company network — it broke in once in ten tries
In a joint preliminary assessment, the US Center for AI Standards and Innovation and the UK AI Security Institute ran Moonshot AI's open-weights Kimi K3 against a deliberately vulnerable 32-step simulated corporate network. Given initial access and up to 100 million tokens per attempt, K3 completed the full attack once in 10 tries and averaged step 17 — well behind leading US closed models' 28.5 — and scored 32% on exploit development, with zero arbitrary-code-execution successes across 41 tasks. Its safeguards did not stop it from attempting offensive operations.
Why it mattersThe agencies' conclusion cuts both ways: K3 can autonomously attack small, weakly defended systems when handed access — a real risk now that its weights are free to download — yet it trails the US frontier in cyber by a wide margin, undercutting claims that open Chinese models have caught up. It's also the clearest look yet at how governments now measure that gap.
▶ Related video: Two Governments Turned Off Kimi K3's Safeguards. It Attacked.
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