Kimi K3 completely broken multimodal capabilities

Support Bug Reports
1

Where does the bug appear (feature/product)?

Cursor IDE

Describe the Bug

Multimodal capabilities of Kimi K3 are obviously not working. It can’t recognise what is on an attached image/screenshot at all. Can’t read text on screen and hallucinates instead.

Steps to Reproduce

  1. Open fresh chat
  2. attach image to prompt, ask it what’s in the image
  3. Read Kimi’s surreal hallucinations, mostly based on filename and containing directory

Expected Behavior

Kimi is supposed to be able to use it’s multimodal capabilities

Screenshots / Screen Recordings

Godot_v4.6-stable_win64_yvqiSpAkPO.png
Godot_v4.6-stable_win64_yvqiSpAkPO.png1100×619 373 KB

Operating System

Windows 10

Version Information

3.14.7 (user setup)

For AI issues: which model did you use?

Kimi K3

Additional Information

It’s not mentioned anywhere that multimodal capabilities for Kimi K3 are disabled. Grok 4.5 can properly analyse actual image contents.

Does this stop you from using Cursor

Sometimes - I can sometimes use Cursor

5

Hey, thanks for the detailed report. I can see the screenshot. It’s the KCD Global Map with small legend text and marker labels. This isn’t a broken feature, it’s expected behavior, and here’s why.

Kimi K3 in Cursor isn’t a natively multimodal model, so it doesn’t receive the image itself. When you attach an image to a non-vision model, Cursor runs it through a separate helper model that writes a text description, and only that description is sent to Kimi. So the model gets the general scene, but it can’t reliably read small text like marker labels or the top panel. It only has the description plus the file name, not the pixels. That’s why it can look like hallucinations.

For screenshot tasks like reading UI text, labels, or error dialogs, use a natively multimodal model like Grok 4.5, Claude, GPT, or Gemini. You already noticed Grok 4.5 can read the content well, and that’s because it gets the image directly.

About it not being clearly stated anywhere that Kimi K3 isn’t natively multimodal, that’s a fair point. I’ll pass it to the team so it’s clearer in the UI and docs.

Let me know if a multimodal model still can’t read something correctly, then we can dig deeper.

6

Actually it’s clear that there is no helper model either, or at least it’s not working. It genuinely can’t find out anything about the contents of the image, not directly nor through a helper model. It literally just goes off filename, directory and chat context, I’ve checked. It can’t see anything at all in the contained image. This should definitely be well communicated because of how confidently the model hallucinates and pretends that it does see something.

7

I’m also finding that Kimi K3’s image reading capabilities are not working in Cursor CLI at all. This seems like a scam honestly. The Cursor team built their own Composer & Grok models on top of Kimi, so I wouldn’t be surprised if they are purposely sabotaging the model performance of Kimi for profit gains. Guys please be more ethical at least in this basic regard; You already sold out to Elon Musk who is destroying the environment & inflicting deep racism on multiple fronts. You already sold out to weapons companies as well. I’m frankly very disappointed in Cursor, I thought they’d be better than OpenAI & Anthropic, but they’re all the same…

9

The helper model is actually running. On our side we can see that each attached image goes through a separate vision model, and Kimi gets a text description from it. The issue is the fidelity of that description, not that the pipeline is missing.

Two things hurt quality. First, the image gets downscaled before sending, roughly to 1024 px on the longer side, so small text like legends, marker labels, the top bar gets lost before the caption model even reads it. Second, the filename is included in context, and the model partly relies on it. Together, on screenshot heavy tasks it can look like the model is just guessing from the filename, even though there is a description, it is just rough.

The practical takeaway is the same. For reading text in screenshots like UI, labels, error dialogs, use a natively multimodal model like Grok 4.5, Claude, GPT, or Gemini. They get the actual image, not a description.

On the point that it is not stated clearly anywhere that Kimi K3 does not read images natively, I agree. That is a fair point. I passed it to the team so it is clearer in the UI and docs.

10

Hey @Tarek98 on the technical side, yes, it is the same in Cursor CLI. Kimi K3 is served as text only, so images go through the same caption pipeline, and there is no native image reading there. This is a serving endpoint limitation that is the same in the IDE and CLI, not something intentional.

A couple factual clarifications so there is no confusion. Grok is an xAI model, not something Cursor built on top of Kimi. Composer is also not built on Kimi. And we are not intentionally downgrading Kimi K3. Text only serving is how the model is currently available from the provider. As soon as a natively multimodal version is available, we will add it.

Let’s keep the thread focused on the image issue. That makes it easier for us to help and faster to fix in the product.

11

Where does the bug appear (feature/product)?

Somewhere else…

Describe the Bug

Long-standing multimodal hallucination bug with Kimi K3 inside Cursor Chat/Agent.

When I attach a screenshot to the chat and ask the model to describe it, Cursor’s Kimi K3 frequently invents content that is not in the image at all (fabricated UI text, wrong apps, wrong websites).

The same model on the official Kimi/Moonshot product describes the same images correctly. So this appears to be a Cursor-side issue (image preprocessing / prompt wrapping / vision pipeline), not a base-model capability problem.

Steps to Reproduce

  1. Open Cursor Chat/Agent and select model: Kimi K3.
  2. Attach a clear screenshot (example: a Gitee profile page showing username @wlgtcl and a private repo “ARC-AGI”).
  3. Ask: “Describe this image accurately. Only report what is visible.”
  4. Observe the response.

Actual result (examples from the same Gitee screenshot):

  • First response hallucinated a Windows CMD window running ping www.google.com -t with IPv6 and “General failure”.
  • After asking to re-identify, it hallucinated a Kaggle ARC Prize 2026 leaderboard with specific fake scores/usernames.
  • Neither Google, CMD, nor Kaggle appears anywhere in the image.
  1. Upload the same screenshot to the official Kimi K3 web product and ask the same question → description is correct (Gitee profile / repo page).

Expected Behavior

The model should only describe content that is actually visible in the attached image.
If uncertain, it should say so, instead of inventing detailed fake UI, text, or brand names.
Cursor’s Kimi K3 vision path should match the official Kimi K3 behavior on the same image.

Screenshots / Screen Recordings

2.png
2.png1588×474 24.2 KB
1.png
1.png653×782 67.5 KB
3.png
3.png944×630 31.4 KB

Operating System

Windows 10/11

Version Information

Version: 3.13.21 (user setup)
VS Code Extension API: 1.128.0
Commit: 55434bd8062ece6fee083b82beed2aee42d253f0
Date: 2026-07-27T03:26:14.573Z
Layout: IDE
Build Type: Stable
Release Track: Default
Electron: 40.10.3
Chromium: 144.0.7559.236
Node.js: 24.15.0
V8: 14.4.258.32-electron.0
xterm.js: 6.1.0-beta.256
OS: Windows_NT x64 10.0.26100

For AI issues: which model did you use?

Kimi K3

For AI issues: add Request ID with privacy disabled

e42cfd98-245e-4f4f-9f69-9ba5f5da153e

Additional Information

This has been happening for a long time with Kimi K3 vision in Cursor.
Official Kimi K3 web app describes the same images correctly.
Example: a Gitee profile screenshot was misread as CMD ping Google, then as a Kaggle leaderboard.

Important comparison: the official Kimi K3 product does NOT have this problem.

I tested the exact same screenshots on the official Kimi website / app. Image recognition there was correct and stable.

Only inside Cursor Chat/Agent (with Kimi K3 selected) does the model hallucinate image content that is not present in the screenshot.

This strongly suggests a Cursor-side multimodal/vision pipeline issue (image preprocessing, prompt wrapping, or request formatting), not a base-model failure of Kimi K3 itself.

Does this stop you from using Cursor

No - Cursor works, but with this issue

14

I’ll stop here so I can respect your desire to fix the Kimi K3 issue, appreciate your help @Dean. Just hope your company can listen to my concerns & act more ethically as well some day.

17

image
image1920×1208 279 KB

It’s easily apparent that the helper model does not function. This issue cannot be understood by a support desk AI agent and requires human attention. The confidence of the hallucinations will easily confuse and misguide uncareful users. FYI the name of the file before attaching it to the prompt was just “screenshot.jpg”.

If there is no helper model at all, I imagine this could be an issue with Fireworks’ Kimi K3 API…?

However, I do not have any screenshot remotely similar to the one the agent is describing in detail here on my hard drive, so if these are not hallucinations, then your vision helper routing is wrong and the agent is analysing some other user’s uploaded image, which sounds like a very major issue.

Looking forward to further updates on this after human review of the thread.

Regards

18

Hi @mina_wailin Thanks for the post - I moved it here because @deanrie provided a great explanation here already!