Kimi K3 may have been in evaluation before Fable 5 could have been distilled

ceciletamura · x · 2026-07-23

A post pushes back on claims that Moonshot’s Kimi K3 was simply distilled from Anthropic’s Fable 5.

It says K3 was already in internal evaluation by April/May, before Fable 5 had been around long enough to be a plausible distillation target. The author also notes that Kimi had already beaten Fable on BrowserComp, arguing that if K3.1 later beats Fable 5 on coding benchmarks, it would be too simplistic to conclude it must have been distilled from Fable 6.

The core point: the evidence so far does not support a “it was all distillation” explanation.

Related event: US Accuses Moonshot of Distilling Anthropic Models, Faces Timeline Backlash(23 posts)→

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