Kimi K2.6
Kimi K2.6 is worth evaluating for coding, rag, and agents when its provider route and context window match the workload.
Use it for
- Teams evaluating coding, rag, and agents
- Workloads that can use a 262k context window
- Buyers comparing 4 tracked provider routes
Do not use it for
- Workloads where another current model has stronger sourced task evidence
Cheapest of 9 routes · Novita AI
About
Kimi K2.6 is Moonshot AI's multimodal agentic coding model, released April 20 2026 under a Modified MIT license. Built on a 1-trillion-parameter MoE architecture (32B active, 384 experts with 8 selected per token plus 1 shared expert, 61 layers), it features a 262K context window and up to 65,536 output tokens. Supports native image and video inputs (screenshots, PDFs, spreadsheets). Designed for long-horizon coding with agent swarms of up to 300 sub-agents and 4,000 coordinated steps; Moonshot AI cites 200–300 sequential tool calls without task drift. Key benchmarks: SWE-bench Verified 80.2%, SWE-bench Pro 58.6%, LiveCodeBench v6 89.6%, GPQA Diamond 90.5%, Terminal-Bench 2.0 66.7%. Chatbot Arena Elo 1454 (2026-04-28 snapshot).
Kimi K2.6 is an open-source model in the Kimi K2 family. The structured metadata tracks a 262k-token context window, multimodal input, reasoning, function calling, tool use, and structured outputs. This page tracks provider routes through Cloudflare Workers AI, NVIDIA NIM, Moonshot AI Kimi, and 6 more, with the cheapest tracked route listed at $0.73 input and $3.49 output per 1M tokens. Headline tracked benchmarks include SWE-bench Verified 80.2, Chatbot Arena 1462.0, and Google-Proof Q&A 90.5.
Top use-case fit: coding, agents, and build tasks
Coding
Q/$ D4 relevant benchmarks in the decision map.
RAG
Included by capability and metadata signals in the decision map.
Agents
Q/$ C1 relevant benchmark in the decision map.
Provider price ladder
Compare all 9Compare API pricing across 4 providers for input and output tokens, batch, and cached reads when available.
| Provider | Input / 1M | Output / 1M | Route |
|---|---|---|---|
| Novita AI | $0.800 | $3.40 | Serverless |
| OpenRouter | $0.730 | $3.49 | Serverless |
| Cloudflare Workers AI | $0.950 | $4.00 | Serverless |
| Fireworks AI | $0.950 | $4.00 | Serverless |
Available via routers & gateways(7)
LiteLLM
GatewayOpen-source Python SDK and proxy server that unifies 100+ LLM APIs behind a single OpenAI-compatible interface, with load balancing, cost tracking, and configurable failover.
OpenRouter
HybridUnified hybrid gateway to 400+ models from 60+ providers via a single OpenAI-compatible API, with optional auto-routing that selects the best model per prompt.
Portkey
GatewayProduction AI gateway routing to 1,600+ LLMs with failover, load balancing, semantic caching, and guardrails; Apache 2.0 core is fully self-hostable with the complete feature set.
Azure AI Foundry Model Router
RouterMicrosoft Azure AI Foundry's native model router that uses a trained ML model to route each prompt in real time to the optimal Azure-hosted model, with Balanced/Cost/Quality mode selection and automatic failover.
Helicone
GatewayObservability-first AI gateway with routing, caching, rate limiting, and request tracing; Apache 2.0 open-source core with a managed hosted tier for logging and analytics.
Kong AI Gateway
GatewayMulti-LLM AI gateway built on Kong Gateway 3.x, adding semantic routing, load balancing, guardrails, and MCP traffic analytics as plugins over Kong's existing API management platform.
Capabilities
Benchmark peer barsfor Coding
Benchmark scores(17)
| Benchmark | Score | Version | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| SWE-bench Verified | 80.2 | SWE-bench Verified | https://www.swebench.com/verified.html |
| Chatbot Arena | 1462.0 | — | https://arena.ai/leaderboard/text |
| Google-Proof Q&A | 90.5 | GPQA Diamond (accuracy) | https://huggingface.co/moonshotai/Kimi-K2.6 |
| MMLU PRO | 84.6 | From Kimi K2 (accuracy) | https://codersera.com/blog/kimi-k2-6-complete-guide-2026/ |
| HumanEval | 92.0 | — | https://moonshotai.github.io/Kimi-K2/ |
| SWE-bench Pro | 58.6 | SWE-bench Pro (resolved%) | https://codersera.com/blog/kimi-k2-6-complete-guide-2026/ |
| Instruction-Following Evaluation | 89.8 | — | https://moonshotai.github.io/Kimi-K2/ |
| MMMU Pro | 80.1 | LLM-Stats aggregator | https://llm-stats.com/benchmarks/mmmu-pro |
| LiveCodeBench | 89.6 | v6 | https://www.kimi.com/blog/kimi-k2-6 |
| Terminal-Bench 2.0 | 66.7 | Terminal-Bench 2.0 (accuracy%) | https://benchlm.ai/benchmarks/terminalBench2 |
| SWE-bench Multilingual | 76.7 | — | https://www.kimi.com/blog/kimi-k2-6 |
| AIME 2026 | 96.4 | AIME 2026 (accuracy) | https://huggingface.co/moonshotai/Kimi-K2.6 |
| BrowseComp | 83.2 | BrowseComp (accuracy%) | https://benchlm.ai/benchmarks/browseComp |
| Humanity's Last Exam | 34.7 | HLE-Full without tools (accuracy) | https://huggingface.co/moonshotai/Kimi-K2.6 |
| MCP-Atlas | 55.9 | MCP-Atlas (accuracy%) | https://benchlm.ai/benchmarks/mcpAtlas |
| CursorBench | 47.6 | CursorBench 3.1 | https://cursor.com/evals |
| GeneBench-Pro | 4.4 | xhigh | https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/21938268-21af-442f-af93-3b2249afb241/genebench-pro.pdf |
Compare Kimi K2.6 to GPT-5.5 head-to-head for benchmarks, pricing, and full specs side by side. On NVIDIA NIM, see pricing and specs or the setup guide (catalog ID moonshotai/kimi-k2.6).
Migration checks
No linked migration route is available for this model yet.
Rankings & picks(6)
Compare Kimi K2.6 with other models
Comparison and alternatives
Browse all comparisons →Show all 32 popular comparisonssorted by 7-day search impressions
Frequently asked questions
What is the context window of Kimi K2.6?
Kimi K2.6 has a context window of 262k tokens.
What is the max output of Kimi K2.6?
Kimi K2.6 can generate up to 65,536 output tokens.
How much does Kimi K2.6 cost?
Kimi K2.6 pricing ranges from $0.73/1M to $1.20/1M input tokens depending on the provider.
When was Kimi K2.6 released?
Kimi K2.6 was released on 2026-04-20.
Which providers offer Kimi K2.6?
Kimi K2.6 is available from 9 providers: Cloudflare Workers AI, NVIDIA NIM, Moonshot AI Kimi, Fireworks AI, OpenRouter, Microsoft Foundry, Vercel AI Gateway, Novita AI, Together AI.
What benchmarks has Kimi K2.6 been tested on?
Kimi K2.6 has been evaluated on 17 benchmarks, including SWE-bench Verified, Chatbot Arena, Google-Proof Q&A, MMLU PRO, HumanEval.
Cheapest of 9 routes · Novita AI