Kimi K2.6: The new leading open weights model

Moonshot’s Kimi K2.6 is the new leading open weights model. Kimi K2.6 lands at #4 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index (54) behind only Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI (all 57)

Key takeaways:

➤ Increase in performance on agentic tasks: Kimi K2.6 achieves an Elo of 1520 on our GDPval-AA evaluation, which is a marked improvement over Kimi K2.5’s Elo of 1309. GDPval-AA is our leading metric for general agentic performance, measuring the performance on knowledge work tasks such as preparing presentations and analysis. Models are given code execution and web browsing tools in an agentic loop via our open source reference agentic harness called Stirrup. This continues Kimi K2.6’s strength in tool use, maintaining a 96% score on τ²-Bench Telecom, placing it among other frontier models in this category.

➤ Low hallucination rate: Kimi K2.5 scores 6 on the AA-Omniscience Index, our knowledge evaluation measuring both accuracy and hallucination rate. This score is primarily driven by a comparatively low hallucination rate of 39% (reduced from Kimi K2.5’s 65%), indicating a greater capability to abstain rather than fabricate knowledge when the model is uncertain. Kimi K2.6’s low hallucination rate places it similarly to other models such as Claude Opus 4.7 (36%) and MiniMax-M2.7 (34%)

➤ High token usage: Kimi K2.6 demonstrates high token usage, but is in line with other frontier models in the same intelligence tier. To run the full Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, Kimi K2.6 used ~160M reasoning tokens. This is slightly lower than Claude Sonnet 4.6 (~190M reasoning tokens) but much higher than GPT 5.4 (~110M reasoning tokens).

➤ Open weights: Kimi K2.6 is a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model with 1T total parameters and 32B active, same as the previous two generations of models Kimi K2 Thinking and Kimi K2.5. Kimi K2.6 again pushes the open weights frontier in intelligence.

➤ Third Party Access: Kimi K2.6 is accessible through Moonshot’s First Party API as well as third party API providers Novita, Baseten, Fireworks, and Parasail

➤ Multimodality: Kimi K2.6 supports Image and Video input and text output natively. The model’s max context length remains 256k.

Kimi K2.6 has significantly higher token usage than Kimi K2.5.

Kimi K2.5 scores 6 on the AA-Omniscience Index, primarily driven by low hallucination rate.

Here’s the full suite of Kimi K2.6 evaluation results:

See Artificial Analysis for further details and benchmarks of Kimi K2.6: https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/kimi-k2-6

Want to dive deeper? Discuss this model with our Discord community: https://discord.gg/ATfzv9v9