The Known Good Updated 29 Jul 2026
Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6 vs MoonshotAI: Kimi K2.6 ·Anthropic vs Moonshot AI

Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6 vs MoonshotAI: Kimi K2.6 — head-to-head comparison

Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6 profile MoonshotAI: Kimi K2.6 profile All comparisons
Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6 — Anthropic
Quality
#17 of 62
80based on 4 of 7 evaluations
Known Good Index
Speed
#182 of 317
43.9
Output tokens per second
Price
#329 of 370
$6.00
Blended per 1M tokens
In $3.00 · Out $15.00
Cache hit price
#195 of 238
$0.30
per 1M tokens (−90%)
Context
#73 of 375
1.00M
tokens (~1,500 pages)
MoonshotAI: Kimi K2.6 — Moonshot AI
Quality
#7 of 62
93based on 3 of 7 evaluations
Known Good Index
Speed
#122 of 317
58.8
Output tokens per second
Price
#225 of 370
$1.16
Blended per 1M tokens
In $0.65 · Out $2.72
Cache hit price
#119 of 238
$0.11
per 1M tokens (−83%)
Context
#199 of 375
262k
tokens (~400 pages)
Summary

On the Known Good Index, Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6 scores 80 and MoonshotAI: Kimi K2.6 scores 93 — a 13-point lead for MoonshotAI: Kimi K2.6. They share 3 published evaluations, with Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6 ahead on 0 and MoonshotAI: Kimi K2.6 ahead on 3.

Blended pricing is $6.00 per 1M tokens for Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6 and $1.16 for MoonshotAI: Kimi K2.6 — MoonshotAI: Kimi K2.6 is about 5.2× cheaper.

Throughput is 44 tokens per second for Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6 and 59 for MoonshotAI: Kimi K2.6, with time to first token at 1.7s and 1.4s. Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6 accepts 1.00M tokens of context against 262k.

Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6 is proprietary; MoonshotAI: Kimi K2.6 is open weights under Open weights (unrestricted). 26 tracked hosts serve one or both.

Generated from tracked data on 29 Jul 2026 · how these comparisons are computed →

At a glance
MetricAnthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6MoonshotAI: Kimi K2.6
Known Good Index 80 based on 4 of 7 evaluations 93 based on 3 of 7 evaluations
Blended $/1M $6.00 $1.16
Output tok/s 44 59
Context window 1.00M 262k
Providers 4 22
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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 Sonnet 4.6MoonshotAI: Kimi K2.6
Known Good Index 80 93
Coding Index 71
Mathematics Index 86 96
Agentic Index 71 87
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 Sonnet 4.6 · marker = MoonshotAI: Kimi K2.6 · scores ingested from Epoch AI (CC-BY 4.0)

GPQA Diamond87 / 91
Mock AIME 2024–2586 / 96
SWE-bench Verified75 / 77

Right-hand figures read Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6 / MoonshotAI: Kimi K2.6. Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6 leads on 0 of 3, MoonshotAI: Kimi K2.6 on 3.

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 Sonnet 4.6MoonshotAI: Kimi K2.6
Text Arena 1,457 1,455
Text Arena (style controlled) 1,472 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 Sonnet 4.6MoonshotAI: Kimi K2.6
Input $/1M $3.00 $0.65
Output $/1M $15.00 $2.72
Blended $/1M $6.00 $1.16
Cache read $/1M $0.300 $0.109
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 Sonnet 4.6MoonshotAI: Kimi K2.6
Context window 1.00M 262k
Max output tokens 128k 262k
The Known Good

Speed & Latency

Median throughput and time to first token across hosting providers

Output speedTime to first token
Throughput and latency

Medians across all tracked providers, derived from OpenRouter endpoint telemetry.

MetricAnthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6MoonshotAI: Kimi K2.6
Output tokens/s 44 59
Time to first token 1.7s 1.4s
The Known Good

Providers

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

26 hosts
Full provider benchmarks →
Provider Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6 blendedAnthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6 tok/s MoonshotAI: Kimi K2.6 blendedMoonshotAI: Kimi K2.6 tok/s
Google · first party $6.00 52
Anthropic · first party $6.00 38
Azure · first party $6.00 38
Amazon Bedrock · first party $6.00 36
Together $2.02 138
CoreWeave $1.34 135
Parasail $1.44 128
BaseTen $1.71 127
Fireworks $1.71 86
Decart $1.34 76
ModelRun $1.38 76
Cloudflare $1.71 56
Inceptron $1.30 52
DigitalOcean $1.37 51
Crusoe $1.40 50
Phala $1.97 42
Baidu · first party $1.16 42
Chutes $1.37 42
DeepInfra $1.44 38
Venice $1.44 36
AtlasCloud $1.71 34
SiliconFlow $1.43 34
Novita $1.45 31
StreamLake $1.54 31
Moonshot AI · first party $1.71 23
Sail Research $1.75 6

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 →