The Known Good Updated 9 Sep 2026 Subscribe
MoonshotAI: Kimi K2.6 vs OpenAI: GPT-5 Mini ·Moonshot AI vs OpenAI

MoonshotAI: Kimi K2.6 vs OpenAI: GPT-5 Mini — head-to-head comparison

MoonshotAI: Kimi K2.6 profile OpenAI: GPT-5 Mini profile All comparisons
MoonshotAI: Kimi K2.6 — Moonshot AI
Quality
#8 of 65
92based on 3 of 7 evaluations
Known Good Index
Speed
#157 of 341
52.4
Output tokens per second
Price
#296 of 450
$1.71
Blended per 1M tokens
In $0.95 · Out $4.00
Cache hit price
#227 of 344
$0.16
per 1M tokens (−83%)
Context
#271 of 487
262k
tokens (~400 pages)
OpenAI: GPT-5 Mini — OpenAI
Quality
#34 of 65
67based on 6 of 7 evaluations
Known Good Index
Speed
#81 of 341
77.1
Output tokens per second
Price
#193 of 450
$0.69
Blended per 1M tokens
In $0.25 · Out $2.00
Cache hit price
#75 of 344
$0.025
per 1M tokens (−90%)
Context
#191 of 487
400k
tokens (~600 pages)
Summary

On the Known Good Index, MoonshotAI: Kimi K2.6 scores 92 and OpenAI: GPT-5 Mini scores 67 — a 25-point lead for MoonshotAI: Kimi K2.6. They share 3 published evaluations, with MoonshotAI: Kimi K2.6 ahead on 3 and OpenAI: GPT-5 Mini ahead on 0.

Blended pricing is $1.71 per 1M tokens for MoonshotAI: Kimi K2.6 and $0.69 for OpenAI: GPT-5 Mini — OpenAI: GPT-5 Mini is about 2.5× cheaper.

Throughput is 52 tokens per second for MoonshotAI: Kimi K2.6 and 77 for OpenAI: GPT-5 Mini, with time to first token at 1.4s and 4.5s. MoonshotAI: Kimi K2.6 accepts 262k tokens of context against 400k.

MoonshotAI: Kimi K2.6 is open weights under Open weights (unrestricted); OpenAI: GPT-5 Mini is proprietary. 25 tracked hosts serve one or both.

Generated from tracked data on 9 Sep 2026 · how these comparisons are computed →

At a glance
MetricMoonshotAI: Kimi K2.6OpenAI: GPT-5 Mini
Known Good Index 92 based on 3 of 7 evaluations 67 based on 6 of 7 evaluations
Blended $/1M $1.71 $0.69
Output tok/s 52 77
Context window 262k 400k
Providers 23 2
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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.

MetricMoonshotAI: Kimi K2.6OpenAI: GPT-5 Mini
Known Good Index 92 67
Coding Index 51
Mathematics Index 93
Reasoning Index 57
Openness Index 60 5
The Known Good

Quality Breakdown

Every evaluation both models report a published score for

Evaluations both models report

Bar = MoonshotAI: Kimi K2.6 · marker = OpenAI: GPT-5 Mini · scores ingested from Epoch AI (CC-BY 4.0)

GPQA Diamond91 / 75
Mock AIME 2024–2596 / 87
SWE-bench Verified77 / 65

Right-hand figures read MoonshotAI: Kimi K2.6 / OpenAI: GPT-5 Mini. MoonshotAI: Kimi K2.6 leads on 3 of 3, OpenAI: GPT-5 Mini on 0.

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.

MetricMoonshotAI: Kimi K2.6OpenAI: GPT-5 Mini
Text Arena 1,455
Text Arena (style controlled) 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.

MetricMoonshotAI: Kimi K2.6OpenAI: GPT-5 Mini
Input $/1M $0.95 $0.25
Output $/1M $4.00 $2.00
Blended $/1M $1.71 $0.69
Cache read $/1M $0.160 $0.025
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.

MetricMoonshotAI: Kimi K2.6OpenAI: GPT-5 Mini
Context window 262k 400k
Max output tokens 236k 128k
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.

MetricMoonshotAI: Kimi K2.6OpenAI: GPT-5 Mini
Output tokens/s 52 77
Time to first token 1.4s 4.5s
The Known Good

Providers

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

25 hosts
Full provider benchmarks →
Provider MoonshotAI: Kimi K2.6 blendedMoonshotAI: Kimi K2.6 tok/s OpenAI: GPT-5 Mini blendedOpenAI: GPT-5 Mini tok/s
CoreWeave $1.34 162
Parasail $1.44 153
BaseTen $1.71 131
Together $2.02 119
ModelRun $1.38 103
Baidu · first party $1.71 69
Inceptron $1.18 56
Decart $1.06 50
Fireworks $1.71 45
DigitalOcean $1.71 44
Phala $1.97 43
Novita $1.45 42
Moonshot AI · first party $1.71 39
StreamLake $1.08 38
Sail Research $1.75 33
Cloudflare $1.71 31
AtlasCloud $1.71 29
SiliconFlow $1.43 27
Crusoe $1.40 26
Chutes $1.28 21
Venice $1.44 21
DeepInfra $1.44 20
GMICloud $1.54 19
OpenAI · first party $0.34 83
Azure · first party $0.69 55

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 →