Claude Opus 5 vs Kimi K2.6
Full profiles: Claude Opus 5 (Anthropic) and Kimi K2.6 (Moonshot AI): every benchmark, price and rank.
Updated · Data from 12 sources
As of 29 Oct 2026, Claude Opus 5 is ahead of Kimi K2.6 on quality (65.5 vs 59.8 on the BenchLeader Index), but Kimi K2.6 is 5.8× cheaper at $1.71 vs $10.00 per 1M tokens blended. Claude Opus 5 leads in every category we measure both in.
Key facts (as of 29 Oct 2026)
- Claude Opus 5 scores 65.5 on the BenchLeader Index and Kimi K2.6 scores 59.8 (BenchLeader, 29 Oct 2026).
- Claude Opus 5 costs $10.00 per 1M tokens blended (list price, 29 Oct 2026).
- Kimi K2.6 costs $1.71 per 1M tokens blended (list price, 29 Oct 2026).
- Of the 22 benchmarks both models have, Claude Opus 5 leads 19 (BenchLeader, 29 Oct 2026).
Claude Opus 5 benchmarks max Anthropic
Kimi K2.6 benchmarks thinking Moonshot AIOpen in the comparison toolWhich to pick for…
The pick's numbers come first. Category scores on the BenchLeader scale (50 is the average model, 15 points one standard deviation). High confidence means a lead of half a standard deviation or more; under one point is called either.
| Use case | Pick | Why | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| Agents & tool use | Claude Opus 5 | 64 vs 58 category score; τ³-Banking (AA) 42.1% vs 23.3% | Medium |
| Maths | Claude Opus 5 | 70 vs 57 category score; LiveBench Mathematics 95.7% vs 84.3% | High |
| Long documents | Either | 65 vs 65 category score; AA-LCR v1.1 79.3% vs 81.0% | Either |
| Images and other media | Claude Opus 5 | 68 vs 62 category score; MMMU-Pro 84.7% vs 79.4% | Medium |
| Chat quality (human preference) | – | Only Claude Opus 5 has an Arena rating (68 category score) | Not comparable |
| Lowest cost | Kimi K2.6 | $1.71 vs $10.00 per 1M blended; agentic coding session $0.073 vs $0.400 | – |
| Fastest first answer | Claude Opus 5 | 43.9 s (Claude Opus 5 (max)) vs 98.4 s (Kimi K2.6 (thinking)) to the first answer token | – |
| High volume on a budget | Neither flagship | A smaller model is usually the better fit: Cheapest good LLMs, Fastest LLMs | – |
Key differences
- Claude Opus 5 (max) leads on quality: 65.5 vs 59.8.
- Claude Opus 5 (max) is stronger in agents & tools, coding, human preference, knowledge, maths, multimodal, reasoning.
- Kimi K2.6 (thinking) is stronger in long context, instruction following.
- Kimi K2.6 (thinking) is 5.8× cheaper ($1.71 vs $10.00 per 1M blended).
At a glance
| Spec | Claude Opus 5 | Kimi K2.6 |
|---|---|---|
| Developer | Anthropic | Moonshot AI |
| Released | 24 Jul 2026 | 20 Apr 2026 |
| Context window (tokens) | 1,000,000 | 262,144 |
| Compared at | Claude Opus 5 (max) | Kimi K2.6 (thinking) |
| Open weights | No | Yes |
| Price in / out / cached input per 1M | $5.00 / $25.00 / $0.500 | $0.950 / $4.00 / $0.160 |
Category by category
Category scores on the BenchLeader scale: 50 is the average evaluated model, 15 points is one standard deviation. A gap under one point is called level.
| Category | Claude Opus 5 (max) | Kimi K2.6 (thinking) | Leader |
|---|---|---|---|
| Reasoning | 69.2 | – | not comparable |
| Coding | 70.0 | – | not comparable |
| Agents & tools | 64.3 | 58.4 | Claude Opus 5 |
| Maths | 70.4 | 57.3 | Claude Opus 5 |
| Knowledge | 65.0 | – | not comparable |
| Instruction following | – | 74.0 | not comparable |
| Human preference | 68.4 | – | not comparable |
| Multimodal | 67.6 | 62.1 | Claude Opus 5 |
| Long context | 64.5 | 65.4 | level |
Where sources disagree
Across the 22 benchmarks both have, Claude Opus 5 leads 19, Kimi K2.6 leads 2 and 1 is a tie. Every overall index that rates both puts Claude Opus 5 ahead.
| Overall index | Claude Opus 5 (max) | Kimi K2.6 (thinking) | Leader |
|---|---|---|---|
| BenchLeader Index | 65.5 | 59.8 | Claude Opus 5 |
| Arena Text | 1491 | 1461† | Claude Opus 5 |
Each publisher runs its own tasks, harnesses and effort settings, so their overall verdicts can differ; BenchLeader reconciles them on one scale. † measured at another effort setting of the same model (the publisher did not test the one compared here).
Price, speed and latency
List prices blended at three input tokens per output token. Per-task prices use the token counts on the methodology page; suite cost is what Artificial Analysis paid to run its whole Intelligence Index.
| Measure | Claude Opus 5 (max) | Kimi K2.6 (thinking) |
|---|---|---|
| Blended price per 1M tokens | $10.00 | $1.71 |
| Input / output per 1M | $5.00 / $25.00 | $0.950 / $4.00 |
| Cached input per 1M | $0.500 | $0.160 |
| Price per task: chat reply | $0.0095 | $0.0016 |
| Price per task: summarize a 30-page report | $0.075 | $0.014 |
| Price per task: code edit | $0.068 | $0.012 |
| Price per task: agentic coding session | $0.400 | $0.073 |
| Price per task: structured extraction | $0.015 | $0.0027 |
| Output speed | 56 tok/s | 47 tok/s |
| Time to first answer | 43.9 s | 98.4 s |
| Time to a complete answer | 52.8 s | 109.2 s |
Each model is compared at its best-ranked reasoning-effort setting. Claude Opus 5 (max) scores 65.5 and takes 44 s to its first answer token; Claude Opus 5 scores 65.2 in 3 s, Claude Opus 5 (high) scores 64.4 in 14 s. Kimi K2.6 (thinking) scores 59.8 and takes 98 s to its first answer token; Kimi K2.6 scores 55.3 in 1 s. Higher effort means more thinking before the answer: better scores, longer waits and more tokens billed. How reasoning effort changes scores and cost.
Every benchmark
132 benchmarks, grouped by category; each name links to the board and its leaders. † measured at another effort setting of the same model, shown for reference and not counted as a win.
| Metric | Publisher | Claude Opus 5 (max) | Kimi K2.6 (thinking) |
|---|---|---|---|
| BenchLeader Index | BenchLeader | 65.5 | 59.8 |
| Agents & tools score | BenchLeader | 64.3 | 58.4 |
| Coding score | BenchLeader | 70.0 | – |
| Human preference score | BenchLeader | 68.4 | – |
| Knowledge score | BenchLeader | 65.0 | – |
| Long context score | BenchLeader | 64.5 | 65.4 |
| Maths score | BenchLeader | 70.4 | 57.3 |
| Multimodal score | BenchLeader | 67.6 | 62.1 |
| Reasoning score | BenchLeader | 69.2 | – |
| Instruction following score | BenchLeader | – | 74.0 |
| Blended price $/M | BenchLeader | $10.00 | $1.71 |
| Output speed | BenchLeader | 56 tok/s | 47 tok/s |
| Time to first answer | BenchLeader | 43.9 s | 98.4 s |
| Context window | BenchLeader | 1,000,000 tokens | 262,144 tokens |
| Reasoning | |||
| GPQA Diamond | Epoch AI Benchmarking Hub | 93.9% | 90.8%† |
| SimpleBench | SimpleBench | 80.6%† | – |
| Arena Hard Prompts | Arena (LMArena) | 1515 | 1485† |
| LiveBench 1.0 Reasoning | LiveBench | 91.2% | 79.4% |
| GPQA Diamond (AA) | Artificial Analysis | 93.2% | 91.1% |
| Humanity's Last Exam (AA) | Artificial Analysis | 54.9% | 37.5% |
| GPQA Diamond (Vals) | Vals AI | 93.4%† | 89.1%† |
| ARC-AGI-1 | ARC Prize | 97.5% | – |
| ARC-AGI-2 | ARC Prize | 90.4% | – |
| ARC-AGI-3 | ARC Prize | 30.2%† | – |
| CritPt | Artificial Analysis | 29.1% | 8.0% |
| MysteryMechanism | Vals AI | 37.4%† | – |
| Chess Puzzles | Epoch AI Benchmarking Hub | 43.0% | 20.0%† |
| Mystery Game Puzzles | Epoch AI Benchmarking Hub | 59.0% | 18.0%† |
| LMCA | Epoch AI Benchmarking Hub | 63.3% | 37.3%† |
| DTBench | Epoch AI Benchmarking Hub | 97.6% | 90.9%† |
| ForecastBench | ForecastBench | 66.5% | – |
| BTF-3 | Epoch AI Benchmarking Hub | 12.0%† | – |
| Coding | |||
| SWE-bench Verified (Epoch) | Epoch AI Benchmarking Hub | – | 76.7%† |
| SciCode | SciCode | 56.4% | 53.5%† |
| WeirdML | WeirdML | 91.8% | 55.9%† |
| FrontierCode | Cognition | 53.4% | – |
| Arena Coding | Arena (LMArena) | 1528 | 1516† |
| Arena WebDev | Arena (LMArena) | 1690 | 1509† |
| LiveBench 1.0 Coding | LiveBench | 81.5% | 78.6% |
Show all 132 benchmarks
| Metric | Publisher | Claude Opus 5 (max) | Kimi K2.6 (thinking) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Coding | |||
| SciCode (AA) | Artificial Analysis | 56.4% | 51.5% |
| LiveCodeBench | Vals AI | 89.0%† | 86.8%† |
| IOI | Vals AI | 84.3%† | – |
| SWE-bench (Vals) | Vals AI | 97.0%† | 76.2%† |
| Code Migration | Vals AI | 57.5%† | 27.8%† |
| ProgramBench | Vals AI | 3.0%† | 0.0%† |
| Vibe Code Bench 1-100 | Vals AI | 28.5%† | – |
| Vibe Code Bench v1.1 | Vals AI | 88.4%† | 37.9%† |
| SWE Atlas: Codebase QnA | Scale AI SEAL | 63.2%† | – |
| SWE Atlas: Test Writing | Scale AI SEAL | 62.2%† | – |
| DeepSWE v1.1 | Epoch AI Benchmarking Hub | 73.7% | – |
| CursorBench | Cursor | 46.6% | – |
| ALE-Bench | Epoch AI Benchmarking Hub | 2164.6† | 1092.7† |
| FrontierSWE | Epoch AI Benchmarking Hub | 52.0% | – |
| Terminal-Bench 4.0 (AA) | Artificial Analysis | 49.0% | 0.5% |
| Terminal-Bench 2.1 (AA) | Artificial Analysis | 89.1% | 65.9% |
| Startrise Frontend | Startrise | 82.3%† | – |
| Agents & tools | |||
| Terminal-Bench | Terminal-Bench | 51.8% | – |
| OSWorld-Verified 2.0 | OSWorld | 31.4% | 4.6%† |
| APEX-Agents | Mercor | 65.8% | – |
| Arena Agent | Arena (LMArena) | 8.2 | – |
| LiveBench Agentic Coding | LiveBench | 65.2% | 46.9% |
| Terminal-Bench Hard | Artificial Analysis | – | 43.9% |
| τ²-Bench Telecom (AA) | Artificial Analysis | – | 95.9% |
| Terminal-Bench 2.1 (Vals) | Vals AI | 84.6%† | 53.6%† |
| MCP Atlas | Scale AI SEAL | 85.8%† | – |
| HiL-Bench | Scale AI SEAL | 57.0%† | 18.7%† |
| τ³-bench Banking | τ²-bench | 48.7% | – |
| τ³-Banking (AA) | Artificial Analysis | 42.1% | 23.3% |
| ITBench SRE (AA) | Artificial Analysis | – | 31.2% |
| Analyst Agent (AA) | Artificial Analysis | 53.8% | – |
| APEX-Agents (AA) | Artificial Analysis | – | 28.5% |
| CUA-bench | Vals AI | 9.0% | – |
| CyberBench | Vals AI | 65.4%† | – |
| Finance Agent v2 | Vals AI | 58.6%† | 44.9%† |
| Harvey's Legal Agent Benchmark v1 | Vals AI | 6.7%† | 1.7%† |
| Legal Research Bench | Vals AI | 55.3%† | 15.9%† |
| SkillsBench | Vals AI | 60.4%† | – |
| SREBench | Vals AI | 12.2%† | – |
| Tax Agent Bench | Vals AI | 45.5%† | 12.4%† |
| Terminal-Bench 2.0 (Vals) | Vals AI | – | 57.3%† |
| Terminal-Bench 4.0 (Vals) | Vals AI | 53.5%† | – |
| Terminal-Bench Science | Vals AI | 27.1%† | – |
| Time Horizon Index: KSP | Vals AI | 18.8%† | – |
| Arena Search | Arena (LMArena) | 1214† | – |
| BALROG | BALROG | 63.4% | – |
| PostTrainBench | Epoch AI Benchmarking Hub | 35.0%† | – |
| ExploitBench | Epoch AI Benchmarking Hub | – | 18.4%† |
| GBAEval | Epoch AI Benchmarking Hub | 79.6%† | 0.9%† |
| Vending-Bench 2 | Andon Labs | 11181.9† | 6204.6† |
| AutomationBench | Artificial Analysis | 56.6% | 13.0% |
| GDP.pdf (AA) | Artificial Analysis | 21.6% | 13.0% |
| EnterpriseOps-Gym | Artificial Analysis | 47.5% | 38.5% |
| AA-Briefcase v1.1 | Artificial Analysis | 1655 | – |
| Terminal-Bench-Science 0.1 (AA) | Artificial Analysis | 28.6% | – |
| DeepSec-Bench (AA) | Artificial Analysis | 25.9% | – |
| FACTS Search | 85.3%† | – | |
| Maths | |||
| FrontierMath Tiers 1–3 | Epoch AI Benchmarking Hub | 85.6% | 57.2%† |
| FrontierMath Tier 4 | Epoch AI Benchmarking Hub | 73.2% | 25.6%† |
| OTIS Mock AIME | Epoch AI Benchmarking Hub | 98.9% | 96.1%† |
| ProofBench | Vals AI | 99.0% | 16.0%† |
| LiveBench Mathematics | LiveBench | 95.7% | 84.3% |
| AIME 2026 | MathArena | – | 95.8% |
| HMMT February 2026 | MathArena | – | 94.7% |
| USAMO 2026 | MathArena | – | 51.2% |
| MathArena Apex | MathArena | – | 24.0% |
| Arena Maths | Arena (LMArena) | 1517 | 1479† |
| Knowledge | |||
| SimpleQA Verified | Epoch AI Benchmarking Hub | 59.9% | 34.9%† |
| LiveBench 1.0 Data Analysis | LiveBench | 74.5% | 65.1% |
| MMLU-Pro | Vals AI | 91.6%† | 87.6%† |
| LegalBench | Vals AI | 87.0%† | 84.7%† |
| CorpFin | Vals AI | 73.2%† | 66.7%† |
| TaxEval | Vals AI | 75.1%† | 74.7%† |
| BioMysteryBench | Vals AI | 79.3%† | – |
| CaseLaw v2 | Vals AI | – | 61.2%† |
| Excel Modeling Benchmark | Vals AI | 73.6%† | 57.9%† |
| MedCode | Vals AI | 63.6%† | 40.1%† |
| MedScribe | Vals AI | 91.0%† | 78.2%† |
| Public Benefits Bench v1.1 | Vals AI | 76.9%† | 56.6%† |
| DrugDiscoveryBench | Scale AI SEAL | 53.7% | – |
| EBR-bench | Epoch AI Benchmarking Hub | 45.7% | 2.4%† |
| GDP.pdf | Epoch AI Benchmarking Hub | 24.0% | 12.0%† |
| Instruction following | |||
| LiveBench Language | LiveBench | 88.7% | 75.1% |
| LiveBench Instruction Following | LiveBench | 63.8% | 64.4% |
| IFBench | Artificial Analysis | – | 76.0% |
| Arena Instruction Following | Arena (LMArena) | 1495 | 1455† |
| Human preference | |||
| Arena Text | Arena (LMArena) | 1491 | 1461† |
| EQ-Bench 4 | EQ-Bench | 1365† | 1191† |
| Arena Creative Writing | Arena (LMArena) | 1474 | 1432† |
| Arena Multi-turn | Arena (LMArena) | 1487 | 1461† |
| Arena Longer Queries | Arena (LMArena) | 1503 | 1477† |
| Multimodal | |||
| Arena Vision | Arena (LMArena) | 1320† | 1282† |
| MMMU-Pro | Artificial Analysis | 84.7% | 79.4% |
| MMMU-Pro (Vals) | Vals AI | 89.9%† | 86.3%† |
| MortgageTax | Vals AI | 72.1%† | 65.8%† |
| Blueprint-Bench 2 | Epoch AI Benchmarking Hub | 30.4%† | 3.9%† |
| Long context | |||
| AA-LCR v1.1 | Artificial Analysis | 79.3% | 81.0% |
| Arena Document | Arena (LMArena) | 1490† | 1450† |
| MLCR | Artificial Analysis | 11.1% | 11.1% |
| Composite | |||
| Epoch Capabilities Index | Epoch AI Benchmarking Hub | 163.9† | 150.9† |
| LiveBench 1.0 | LiveBench | 80.1% | 70.5% |
| AA Intelligence Index v4.3.2 | Artificial Analysis | 50.8 | 27.0 |
| AA Progress Index v1 | Artificial Analysis | 333.7 | 284.4 |
| Vals RSI Index | Vals AI | 33.0% | – |
| Vals Science Index | Vals AI | 47.9%† | – |
| Vals Multimodal Index | Vals AI | 73.9%† | 56.4%† |
| Safety & honesty | |||
| FORTRESS | Scale AI SEAL | 16.8%† | – |
Data as of 2026-10-29. Best configuration of each model; every score links to its source on the model pages.
What changed
- Claude Opus 5 (max): BenchLeader Index 66.3 → 65.5.
- Kimi K2.6 (thinking): BenchLeader Index 60.3 → 59.8.
- Claude Opus 5 (max): 1 new result (AA Progress Index v1).
- Kimi K2.6 (thinking): 1 new result (AA Progress Index v1).
- Claude Opus 5 (max): BenchLeader Index 66.8 → 66.3.
- Kimi K2.6 (thinking): cost per task moved from $0.80/M to $0.71/M (12% down).
- Claude Opus 5 (max): 1 new result (Vals RSI Index).
- Claude Opus 5 (max): 1 score revision.
- Kimi K2.6 (thinking): 1 new result (MLCR).
- Claude Opus 5 (max): 1 new result (ForecastBench); 1 score revision.
Related comparisons
- Claude Opus 5 vs Claude Opus 5.5
- Claude Opus 5 vs GPT-6 Astra
- Claude Opus 5 vs GPT-6.1 Sol
- Kimi K2.6 vs Claude Opus 5.5
- Kimi K2.6 vs GPT-6 Astra
- Kimi K2.6 vs GPT-6.1 Sol
- Kimi K2.6 vs Claude Fable 5.1
- Claude Fable 5 vs Kimi K2.6
Rankings: Best LLM overall · Best LLM for coding · Best LLM for agents · Best cheap LLMs
Claude Opus 5 vs Kimi K2.6: questions
- Is Claude Opus 5 better than Kimi K2.6?
- Claude Opus 5 (max) leads on quality: 65.5 vs 59.8. The BenchLeader Index combines every independent quality benchmark; Claude Opus 5 (max) is ahead overall as of 29 Oct 2026, but check the category scores for your use.
- Claude Opus 5 vs Kimi K2.6: which is cheaper, and will that change?
- Kimi K2.6 is cheaper today: $1.71 against $10.00 per million tokens, blended at three input tokens per output token. No price change has been announced for either.
- Which is faster, Claude Opus 5 or Kimi K2.6?
- Claude Opus 5 streams faster (56 vs 47 output tokens per second, Artificial Analysis 7-day median).
- Is Claude Opus 5 or Kimi K2.6 better for agents and tool use?
- Claude Opus 5 scores higher in agentic tasks (64 vs 58 on the category index, where 50 is average). On τ³-Banking (AA), the top shared agents & tools benchmark, it is 42.1% for Claude Opus 5 against 23.3% for Kimi K2.6.
- Which is better for long documents?
- They are level on long-context benchmarks (65 vs 65). Claude Opus 5 accepts more context: 1,000,000 against 262,144 tokens for Kimi K2.6.
More questions (3)
- Which has lower latency?
- Claude Opus 5 answers first: 43.9 s against 98.4 s to the first answer token, as Artificial Analysis measures it. Reasoning effort drives most of this: a higher setting thinks longer before it answers.
- Do independent benchmarks agree on Claude Opus 5 vs Kimi K2.6?
- Across the 22 benchmarks both have, Claude Opus 5 leads 19, Kimi K2.6 leads 2 and 1 is a tie. Every overall index that rates both puts Claude Opus 5 ahead.
- When was Claude Opus 5 released?
- Claude Opus 5 was released on 24 Jul 2026.