// head_to_head
Claude Opus 4.5 vs Kimi K2.6
Published LiveBench scores across all seven categories, live list pricing, context windows, and the measured cost of a point of capability — for both models, side by side.
Claude Opus 4.5 scores higher, Kimi K2.6 costs less — it depends on your workload.
Claude Opus 4.5 is ahead by 2.0 points overall, and Kimi K2.6 lists 9.9× cheaper per blended million tokens. Whether 2.0 points is worth that depends on how much a wrong answer costs you. Kimi K2.6 also leads on measured cost per point of capability, at $0.0918 per point.
anthropic
Claude Opus 4.5
- Blended / 1M
- $10.00
- Context
- 200K
- Released
- Nov 24, 2025
- Overall score
- 72.6
moonshotai
Kimi K2.6
- Blended / 1M
- $1.01
- Context
- 262K
- Released
- Apr 20, 2026
- Overall score
- 70.5
Specs and pricing
| Metric | Claude Opus 4.5 | Kimi K2.6 |
|---|---|---|
| LiveBench overall Mean of the seven LiveBench category scores, 0–100. Higher is better. | 72.6win | 70.5 |
| Cost per point Measured benchmark spend divided by overall score — dollars per point of capability. | $0.3211 | $0.0918win |
| Blended price / 1M 3:1 input:output mix, the usual shape of production traffic. | $10.00 | $1.01win |
| Input price / 1M | $5.00 | $0.560win |
| Output price / 1M | $25.00 | $2.36win |
| Cached input / 1M Price of an input token served from the prompt cache, where the provider publishes one. | $0.500 | $0.094win |
| Context window | 200K | 262Kwin |
| Max output tokens | 64K | 262Kwin |
Benchmarks by category
An overall score averages away the thing you probably care about. These are the seven LiveBench categories scored separately — Claude Opus 4.5 on top, Kimi K2.6 below, both out of 100.
What each one costs to run
Per-token prices are hard to feel. These are monthly list costs for both models across five workload shapes, using each provider's published cached-input rate where there is one.
| Workload | Claude Opus 4.5 | Kimi K2.6 |
|---|---|---|
| Support chatbot 1.2K in / 400 out × 200K requests | $2876.00/mo | $289.76/mo |
| RAG assistant 8K in / 600 out × 100K requests | $3700.00/mo | $403.56/mo |
| Coding agent 40K in / 4K out × 20K requests | $3480.00/mo | $376.18/mo |
| Document extraction 20K in / 1.5K out × 50K requests | $6650.00/mo | $714.19/mo |
| Bulk classification 500 in / 20 out × 5M requests | $12,750/mo | $1404.20/mo |
Which should you pick?
You are running this at volume
Kimi K2.6
Lowest measured cost per point of capability at $0.0918 per point — the gap compounds with every request.
Quality matters more than the bill
Claude Opus 4.5
Highest overall LiveBench score of the two at 72.6.
The workload is coding or agentic work
Kimi K2.6
Leads on agentic coding — 46.9 against 39.7.
You need to fit large documents in one call
Kimi K2.6
Wider context window — 262K against 200K.
Claude Opus 4.5 vs Kimi K2.6 FAQ
Which is better, Claude Opus 4.5 or Kimi K2.6?
Claude Opus 4.5 scores higher, Kimi K2.6 costs less — it depends on your workload. Claude Opus 4.5 is ahead by 2.0 points overall, and Kimi K2.6 lists 9.9× cheaper per blended million tokens. Whether 2.0 points is worth that depends on how much a wrong answer costs you. Kimi K2.6 also leads on measured cost per point of capability, at $0.0918 per point.
Is Claude Opus 4.5 cheaper than Kimi K2.6?
Kimi K2.6 is cheaper. On a 3:1 input:output blend, Claude Opus 4.5 lists at $10.00 per million tokens and Kimi K2.6 at $1.01 — Kimi K2.6 is 9.9× cheaper. Input and output are priced separately — Claude Opus 4.5 charges $5.00 in and $25.00 out, Kimi K2.6 charges $0.560 and $2.36 — so the model that looks cheaper flips depending on how output-heavy your workload is.
Claude Opus 4.5 vs Kimi K2.6: which scores higher on benchmarks?
Claude Opus 4.5 scores 72.6 and Kimi K2.6 scores 70.5 overall on LiveBench, the mean of its seven categories. That is a 2.0-point lead for Claude Opus 4.5. Category scores differ from the overall figure — a model can lead on reasoning and trail on coding, which the per-category table above breaks out.
Which gives better value for money, Claude Opus 4.5 or Kimi K2.6?
Kimi K2.6. Cost per point divides the measured dollars LiveBench spent running the benchmark by the score it earned, so it captures something token pricing misses: a reasoning model can emit many times more tokens than its per-token rate suggests. Claude Opus 4.5 works out at $0.3211 per point and Kimi K2.6 at $0.0918.
Does Claude Opus 4.5 or Kimi K2.6 have a bigger context window?
Kimi K2.6 has the larger context window: 200K for Claude Opus 4.5 against 262K for Kimi K2.6. Note that a window you can fill is not a window you should fill — retrieval quality usually degrades well before the limit, and you pay for every token you put in it.
Do Claude Opus 4.5 and Kimi K2.6 support prompt caching?
Both publish a cached-input rate: $0.500 per million for Claude Opus 4.5 and $0.094 for Kimi K2.6, against full input rates of $5.00 and $0.560. On a workload with a long stable prefix — a system prompt, a tool schema, a retrieved corpus — that changes the economics more than the headline price does.
Related comparisons
How these numbers are produced
- Price — provider list price from OpenRouter, refreshed every 15 minutes. “Blended” is a 3:1 input:output mix.
- Scores — LiveBench release 2026-06-25, using their own category map. Each model shows its strongest published run. A blank means “not evaluated”, never “bad”.
- Cost per point — the measured dollars LiveBench spent on the run, divided by the score it earned.
- “Win” — awarded only past a threshold: one full point on a benchmark score, 10% on a price, 25% on a context window. Anything tighter reports as a tie, because effort settings alone move a LiveBench score by more than that.
Published benchmarks rank models on someone else's tasks. Before committing, see LLM & agent evaluation for building an eval on your own.