Claude Sonnet 4.6 vs Kimi K3
Claude Sonnet 4.6 
Kimi K3 Verdict
- Kimi K3 leads on quality: 66.5 vs 60.4.
- Claude Sonnet 4.6 is stronger in instruction following, reasoning.
- Kimi K3 is stronger in agents & tools, coding, composite, human preference, knowledge, long context, maths, multimodal.
- They cost about the same ($6.00 per 1M blended).
| Metric | Claude Sonnet 4.6 | Kimi K3 |
|---|---|---|
| BenchLeader Index | 60.4 | 66.5 |
| Agents & tools score | 54.6 | 67.4 |
| Coding score | 57.1 | 65.0 |
| Composite score | 67.5 | 74.2 |
| Human preference score | 62.0 | 71.2 |
| Instruction following score | 56.9 | – |
| Knowledge score | 62.3 | 68.2 |
| Long context score | 66.6 | 71.1 |
| Maths score | 62.7 | 78.1 |
| Multimodal score | 60.6 | 65.0 |
| Reasoning score | 65.2 | – |
| Blended price $/M | $6.00 | $6.00 |
| Output speed | 42 tok/s | 38 tok/s |
| Time to first answer | 2.2 s | 56.3 s |
| Context window | 1M | 1.0M |
| GPQA Diamond | 87.4% | – |
| OTIS Mock AIME | 85.8% | – |
| SWE-bench Verified (Epoch) | 75.2% | – |
| Terminal-Bench | 53.4% | – |
| SciCode | – | 58.7% |
| APEX-Agents | – | 39.3% |
| FrontierCode | 24.3% | 44.2% |
| ProofBench | – | 87.0% |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | 152.3 | 157.6 |
| LMArena Text | 1472 | – |
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1504 | – |
| LMArena Coding | 1528 | – |
| LMArena WebDev | 1521 | – |
| LMArena Vision | 1282 | – |
| LMArena Agent | -1 | – |
| LiveBench | – | 79.2% |
| LiveBench Reasoning | – | 90.7% |
| LiveBench Coding | – | 81.5% |
| LiveBench Agentic Coding | – | 62.2% |
| LiveBench Mathematics | – | 84.4% |
| LiveBench Data Analysis | – | 78.7% |
| LiveBench Language | – | 85.5% |
| AA Intelligence Index | 30.4 | 43.8 |
| IFBench | 56.6% | – |
| AA-LCR | 80.0% | 88.7% |
| MMMU-Pro | 73.3% | 80.5% |
| AA-Omniscience | 12.2 | 19.7 |
| Terminal-Bench Hard | 53.0% | – |
| GPQA Diamond (AA) | 87.5% | 93.5% |
| Humanity's Last Exam (AA) | 33.6% | 46.9% |
| SciCode (AA) | 50.1% | 59.5% |
| τ²-Bench Telecom (AA) | 79.5% | – |
| AIME (Vals) | 92.3% | – |
| LiveCodeBench | 82.1% | – |
| MMLU-Pro | 87.3% | – |
| LegalBench | 82.1% | 86.0% |
| CorpFin | 65.3% | 71.6% |
| TaxEval | 77.1% | 75.7% |
| MedQA | 92.1% | – |
| Terminal-Bench 2.1 (Vals) | 57.3% | 80.9% |
| SWE-bench (Vals) | 77.4% | 93.4% |
| GPQA Diamond (Vals) | 85.6% | 92.9% |
| Vals Index | 50.6 | 57.8 |
| MCP Atlas | 69.5% | – |
| EQ-Bench 4 | 1207 | 1339 |
Data as of 2026-09-10. Best configuration of each model; every score links to its source on the model pages.
Claude Sonnet 4.6 vs Kimi K3: questions
- Is Claude Sonnet 4.6 better than Kimi K3?
- Kimi K3 leads on quality: 66.5 vs 60.4. The BenchLeader Index combines every independent quality benchmark; Kimi K3 is ahead overall as of 2026-09-10, but check the category scores for your use.
- Is Claude Sonnet 4.6 better than Kimi K3 for coding?
- Kimi K3 scores higher in coding (65 vs 57 on the category index, where 50 is average).
- Is Claude Sonnet 4.6 better than Kimi K3 for agentic tasks?
- Kimi K3 scores higher in agentic tasks (67 vs 55 on the category index, where 50 is average).
- Which is cheaper, Claude Sonnet 4.6 or Kimi K3?
- Claude Sonnet 4.6 is cheaper: $6.00 against $6.00 per million tokens, blended at three input tokens per output token.
- Which is faster, Claude Sonnet 4.6 or Kimi K3?
- Claude Sonnet 4.6 streams faster: 42 against 38 output tokens per second.
- Which has the larger context window?
- Kimi K3 accepts more context: 1.0M against 1M tokens.