Claude Sonnet 5 vs Kimi K2.6
Claude Sonnet 5 vs Kimi K2.6: which AI model is cheaper, has the larger context window and more capabilities? Side-by-side comparison updated daily.
Quick verdict
- Kimi K2.6 is 3.0× cheaper than Claude Sonnet 5 for the same mix of input and output tokens.
- Claude Sonnet 5 has the larger context window (1M), useful for long documents and big codebases.
- Claude Sonnet 5 is the more recent release (Jun 30, 2026).
- Only Kimi K2.6 has openly published weights you can run yourself.
- Claude Sonnet 5 scores higher on independent tests (overall index 156.3 vs 151.0).
- Choose Kimi K2.6 if cost matters most; choose Claude Sonnet 5 if you need its specific strengths above. For the best results, test both on your own prompts.
| Claude Sonnet 5 | Kimi K2.6 | |
|---|---|---|
| Company | Anthropic | Moonshot AI |
| Released | Jun 30, 2026 ● | Apr 20, 2026 |
| Overall index | 156.3 ● | 151.0 |
| SWE-bench Verified | — | 76.7% |
| GPQA Diamond | 90.5% | 90.8% ● |
| AIME math | 94.7% | 96.1% ● |
| FrontierMath | 65.6% ● | 57.2% |
| SimpleQA Verified | 33.7% | 34.9% ● |
| Input (per 1M tokens) | $2 | $0.65 ● |
| Output (per 1M tokens) | $10 | $3.41 ● |
| Cost for 1M input + 1M output tokens | $12.00 | $4.06 ● |
| Providers | 10 | 18 ● |
| Context | 1M ● | 256K |
| Max output | 128K | 236K ● |
| Inputs | Text, Image, Files ● | Text, Image |
| Outputs | Text | Text |
| Reasoning | ✓ | ✓ |
| Tool use | ✓ | ✓ |
| Structured output | ✓ | ✓ |
| Open weights | — | ✓ |