Claude Opus 4.8 vs Kimi K2.6
Claude Opus 4.8 
Kimi K2.6 Verdict
- Claude Opus 4.8 leads on quality: 64.8 vs 60.7.
- Claude Opus 4.8 is stronger in agents & tools, coding, composite, human preference, knowledge, multimodal.
- Kimi K2.6 is stronger in instruction following, long context, reasoning, maths.
- Kimi K2.6 is 5.8× cheaper ($1.71 vs $10.00 per 1M blended).
| Metric | Claude Opus 4.8 | Kimi K2.6 |
|---|---|---|
| BenchLeader Index | 64.8 | 60.7 |
| Agents & tools score | 65.0 | 45.1 |
| Coding score | 65.6 | 60.4 |
| Composite score | 82.1 | 68.6 |
| Human preference score | 65.8 | 60.8 |
| Instruction following score | 61.8 | 73.7 |
| Knowledge score | 66.5 | 58.6 |
| Long context score | 65.4 | 67.1 |
| Multimodal score | 64.5 | 63.7 |
| Reasoning score | 64.6 | 66.0 |
| Maths score | – | 53.8 |
| Blended price $/M | $10.00 | $1.71 |
| Output speed | 56 tok/s | 44 tok/s |
| Time to first answer | 29.3 s | 103.2 s |
| Context window | 1M | 262k |
| GPQA Diamond | – | 90.8% |
| FrontierMath Tiers 1–3 | – | 57.2% |
| FrontierMath Tier 4 | – | 25.6% |
| OTIS Mock AIME | – | 96.1% |
| SWE-bench Verified (Epoch) | – | 76.7% |
| SimpleQA Verified | – | 34.9% |
| SimpleBench | 64.8% | – |
| OSWorld-Verified 2.0 | – | 4.6% |
| SciCode | – | 53.5% |
| Remote Labor Index | 8.3% | – |
| WeirdML | – | 55.9% |
| APEX-Agents | – | 18.9% |
| FrontierCode | 46.5% | – |
| ProofBench | – | 16.0% |
| GSO-Bench | 47.1% | – |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | 158.3 | 151.0 |
| LMArena Text | 1473 | 1461 |
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1503 | 1485 |
| LMArena Coding | 1527 | 1514 |
| LMArena WebDev | 1540 | 1509 |
| LMArena Vision | 1289 | 1281 |
| AA Intelligence Index | 42.0 | 31.3 |
| IFBench | 62.2% | 76.0% |
| AA-LCR | 77.7% | 81.0% |
| MMMU-Pro | – | 79.4% |
| AA-Omniscience | 28.8 | 5.3 |
| Terminal-Bench Hard | 58.3% | 43.9% |
| GPQA Diamond (AA) | 92.0% | 91.1% |
| Humanity's Last Exam (AA) | 48.7% | 37.5% |
| SciCode (AA) | 54.4% | 51.5% |
| τ²-Bench Telecom (AA) | 94.4% | 95.9% |
| LiveCodeBench | 87.8% | 86.8% |
| MMLU-Pro | 89.6% | 87.6% |
| LegalBench | 83.6% | 84.7% |
| CorpFin | 66.7% | 66.7% |
| TaxEval | 75.6% | 74.7% |
| Terminal-Bench 2.1 (Vals) | 71.9% | 53.6% |
| SWE-bench (Vals) | 88.6% | 76.2% |
| GPQA Diamond (Vals) | 92.4% | 89.1% |
| Vals Index | 60.9 | 43.5 |
| HiL-Bench | 35.3% | 18.7% |
| EQ-Bench 4 | 1281 | 1202 |
Data as of 2026-09-10. Best configuration of each model; every score links to its source on the model pages.
Claude Opus 4.8 vs Kimi K2.6: questions
- Is Claude Opus 4.8 better than Kimi K2.6?
- Claude Opus 4.8 leads on quality: 64.8 vs 60.7. The BenchLeader Index combines every independent quality benchmark; Claude Opus 4.8 is ahead overall as of 2026-09-10, but check the category scores for your use.
- Is Claude Opus 4.8 better than Kimi K2.6 for coding?
- Claude Opus 4.8 scores higher in coding (66 vs 60 on the category index, where 50 is average).
- Is Claude Opus 4.8 better than Kimi K2.6 for agentic tasks?
- Claude Opus 4.8 scores higher in agentic tasks (65 vs 45 on the category index, where 50 is average).
- Which is cheaper, Claude Opus 4.8 or Kimi K2.6?
- Kimi K2.6 is cheaper: $1.71 against $10.00 per million tokens, blended at three input tokens per output token.
- Which is faster, Claude Opus 4.8 or Kimi K2.6?
- Claude Opus 4.8 streams faster: 56 against 44 output tokens per second.
- Which has the larger context window?
- Claude Opus 4.8 accepts more context: 1M against 262k tokens.