The Known Good Updated 2 Sep 2026 Subscribe
Anthropic: Claude Opus 4.5 vs MoonshotAI: Kimi K2.6 ·Anthropic vs Moonshot AI

Anthropic: Claude Opus 4.5 vs MoonshotAI: Kimi K2.6 — head-to-head comparison

Anthropic: Claude Opus 4.5 profile MoonshotAI: Kimi K2.6 profile All comparisons
Anthropic: Claude Opus 4.5 — Anthropic
Quality
#27 of 65
72based on 5 of 7 evaluations
Known Good Index
Speed
#176 of 339
47.0
Output tokens per second
Price
#409 of 439
$10.00
Blended per 1M tokens
In $5.00 · Out $25.00
Cache hit price
#299 of 322
$0.50
per 1M tokens (−90%)
Context
#314 of 473
200k
tokens (~300 pages)
MoonshotAI: Kimi K2.6 — Moonshot AI
Quality
#7 of 65
93based on 3 of 7 evaluations
Known Good Index
Speed
#157 of 339
51.9
Output tokens per second
Price
#288 of 439
$1.71
Blended per 1M tokens
In $0.95 · Out $4.00
Cache hit price
#210 of 322
$0.16
per 1M tokens (−83%)
Context
#264 of 473
262k
tokens (~400 pages)
Summary

On the Known Good Index, Anthropic: Claude Opus 4.5 scores 72 and MoonshotAI: Kimi K2.6 scores 93 — a 20-point lead for MoonshotAI: Kimi K2.6. They share 3 published evaluations, with Anthropic: Claude Opus 4.5 ahead on 0 and MoonshotAI: Kimi K2.6 ahead on 2.

Blended pricing is $10.00 per 1M tokens for Anthropic: Claude Opus 4.5 and $1.71 for MoonshotAI: Kimi K2.6 — MoonshotAI: Kimi K2.6 is about 5.8× cheaper.

Throughput is 47 tokens per second for Anthropic: Claude Opus 4.5 and 52 for MoonshotAI: Kimi K2.6, with time to first token at 1.4s and 1.4s. Anthropic: Claude Opus 4.5 accepts 200k tokens of context against 262k.

Anthropic: Claude Opus 4.5 is proprietary; MoonshotAI: Kimi K2.6 is open weights under Open weights (unrestricted). 28 tracked hosts serve one or both.

Generated from tracked data on 3 Sep 2026 · how these comparisons are computed →

At a glance
MetricAnthropic: Claude Opus 4.5MoonshotAI: Kimi K2.6
Known Good Index 72 based on 5 of 7 evaluations 93 based on 3 of 7 evaluations
Blended $/1M $10.00 $1.71
Output tok/s 47 52
Context window 200k 262k
Providers 5 23
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Quality

Known Good Index and the capability indices, side by side

Index scores

Each index is min-max normalised across tracked models and scaled 0–100 from published evaluations. We do not run these evaluations.

MetricAnthropic: Claude Opus 4.5MoonshotAI: Kimi K2.6
Known Good Index 72 93
Coding Index 80
Reasoning Index 58
Openness Index 5 60
The Known Good

Quality Breakdown

Every evaluation both models report a published score for

Evaluations both models report

Bar = Anthropic: Claude Opus 4.5 · marker = MoonshotAI: Kimi K2.6 · scores ingested from Epoch AI (CC-BY 4.0)

GPQA Diamond86 / 91
Mock AIME 2024–2586 / 96
SWE-bench Verified77 / 77

Right-hand figures read Anthropic: Claude Opus 4.5 / MoonshotAI: Kimi K2.6. Anthropic: Claude Opus 4.5 leads on 0 of 3, MoonshotAI: Kimi K2.6 on 2.

The Known Good

Arena Elo

Human preference rating from blind pairwise votes

Arena ratings

Elo from blind pairwise votes, ingested from Arena. Higher is better.

MetricAnthropic: Claude Opus 4.5MoonshotAI: Kimi K2.6
Text Arena 1,450 1,455
Text Arena (style controlled) 1,469 1,461
The Known Good

Price & Cost

Published API pricing by token type

Published pricing

USD per 1M tokens. Blended is a 3:1 input:output mix. Live from OpenRouter, cross-checked against models.dev. Lower is better.

MetricAnthropic: Claude Opus 4.5MoonshotAI: Kimi K2.6
Input $/1M $5.00 $0.95
Output $/1M $25.00 $4.00
Blended $/1M $10.00 $1.71
Cache read $/1M $0.500 $0.160
The Known Good
We publish blended price rather than cost-per-task. Cost-per-task requires token counts from an evaluation suite we do not run. Blended price is computed from published rates and is fully reproducible — see the pricing methodology.

Context Window

Maximum input accepted and maximum output emitted

Context and output limits

Provider-declared limits, from metadata via models.dev and OpenRouter. Higher is better.

MetricAnthropic: Claude Opus 4.5MoonshotAI: Kimi K2.6
Context window 200k 262k
Max output tokens 64k 236k
The Known Good

Speed & Latency

Mean throughput and time to first token across hosting providers, over successful measurements from the last 48 hours

Throughput and latency

Means across all tracked providers over successful measurements from the last 48 hours, derived from OpenRouter endpoint telemetry.

MetricAnthropic: Claude Opus 4.5MoonshotAI: Kimi K2.6
Output tokens/s 47 52
Time to first token 1.4s 1.4s
The Known Good

Providers

Which hosts serve each model, and at what price and speed

28 hosts
Full provider benchmarks →
Provider Anthropic: Claude Opus 4.5 blendedAnthropic: Claude Opus 4.5 tok/s MoonshotAI: Kimi K2.6 blendedMoonshotAI: Kimi K2.6 tok/s
Azure · first party $10.00 135
Amazon Bedrock · first party $10.00 87
Claude Platform on AWS $10.00 77
Anthropic · first party $10.00 40
Google · first party $10.00 5
CoreWeave $1.34 255
BaseTen $1.71 193
Together $2.02 119
ModelRun $1.38 103
Decart $1.00 85
Parasail $1.44 73
Cloudflare $1.71 58
Baidu · first party $1.71 54
Inceptron $1.02 46
SiliconFlow $1.43 43
Fireworks $1.71 42
Chutes $1.28 41
DigitalOcean $1.71 39
Novita $1.45 38
StreamLake $1.08 34
Sail Research $1.75 33
AtlasCloud $1.71 31
Phala $1.97 31
Moonshot AI · first party $1.71 28
Venice $1.44 24
Crusoe $1.40 22
DeepInfra $1.44 20
GMICloud $1.54 8

Per-host pricing and telemetry from OpenRouter. A dash means that host does not serve that model.

The Known Good
Sources for this page
Pricing & providers — OpenRouter Metadata — models.dev Benchmarks — Epoch AI (CC-BY 4.0)Elo — Arena Full attribution →