Kimi K3 (Max) vs. Kimi K2.6 (Reasoning)

Comparison between Kimi K3 (Max) and Kimi K2.6 (Reasoning) across intelligence, price, speed, context window and more.

For details relating to our methodology, see our Methodology page.

	Kimi	Kimi
Intelligence
AA-Briefcase v1.1	1498	820
AutomationBench-AA	58%	13%
Terminal-Bench 4.0	13%	1%
GDP.pdf	22%	13%
HLE-Diamond	27%
CritPt v2 (Hard Subset)	40%
Terminal-Bench-Science 0.1	8%
Cost
Price per 1M Tokens	$2.31	$0.702
Input Price per 1M Tokens	$3.00	$0.95
Output Price per 1M Tokens	$15.00	$4.00
Cache Hit Price per 1M Tokens	$0.30	$0.16
Token Use
Performance
Output Speed	56 tokens/s	80 tokens/s
Time to First Token	3.25s	2.64s
Time to First Answer Token	39.24s	58.30s
End-to-End Response Time	48.24s	64.55s
Technical specifications
Context Window	1049k tokens~1,573 A4 pages of size 12 Arial font	256k tokens~384 A4 pages of size 12 Arial font
Release Date	July 2026	April 2026
Total parameters	2.8T	1T
Active parameters	104B	32B
Reasoning	Yes	Yes
Input modality	Supports: text and image	Supports: text, image, and video
Output modality	Supports: text	Supports: text
Open Source (Weights)	Yes	Yes
License	Kimi K3 License	Modified MIT
License Supports Commercial Use Without Restrictions	Yes	Yes

Updated

Intelligence

Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index · Higher is better

No data available

Speed

Output tokens per second · Higher is better

Cost per Task

Weighted average cost (USD) per Intelligence Index task · Lower is better

No data available

IntelligenceUpdated

Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index

Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v5.0 incorporates 9 evaluations: AA-Briefcase v1.1, AutomationBench-AA, Terminal-Bench 4.0, FrontierCode 2.0, AA-Omniscience v1.1, GDP.pdf, HLE-Diamond, CritPt v2 (Hard Subset), and Terminal-Bench-Science 0.1

Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v5.0 includes: AA-Briefcase v1.1, AutomationBench-AA, Terminal-Bench 4.0, FrontierCode 2.0, AA-Omniscience v1.1, GDP.pdf, HLE-Diamond, CritPt v2 (Hard Subset), Terminal-Bench-Science 0.1. See Intelligence Index methodology for further details, including a breakdown of each evaluation and how we run them.

Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index by Open Weights / Proprietary

Indicates whether the model weights are available. Models are labelled as 'Commercial Use Restricted' if commercial use is limited by conditions, and as 'Non-commercial' if the license prohibits commercial use.

Intelligence Index vs. Cost per Task

Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index · Weighted average cost (USD) per Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index task

Most attractive quadrant

Pareto line

AA-Briefcase v1.1

AutomationBench-AA

Cost per Task (USD, Log Scale)

Weighted average cost per Intelligence Index task. Each evaluation’s cost is calculated from input, cache hit, cache write, reasoning, and answer token prices, divided by task count, and weighted by its Intelligence Index weight.

Benchmarks

Evaluations

Evaluations measured independently by Artificial Analysis · AA-PersonalityBench scores are percentile ranks from 1 to 100

AA-Briefcase v1.1

Agentic knowledge work, Elo

AA-Omniscience v1.1 AccuracyUpdated

Knowledge

AA-Omniscience v1.1 Non-Hallucination RateUpdated

1 - hallucination rate

AutomationBench-AA

Agentic SaaS workflows

Terminal-Bench-Science 0.1New

Agentic scientific research workflows in a terminal

FrontierCode 2.0New

Agentic software engineering in open-source repositories

HLE-DiamondNew

Reasoning & knowledge

GDP.pdf

Professional document reasoning, All-pass

Terminal-Bench 4.0

Agentic coding & terminal use

CritPt v2 (Hard Subset)

Physics reasoning

AA-AnalystAgent

Quantitative analysis on spreadsheets & documents

Harvey LAB-AA v1.1Updated

Legal agentic work, Hallucination-Gated All-Pass Rate

EnterpriseOps-Gym-AA

Agentic business operations

GDPval-AA v2.1

Agentic real-world work tasks, Elo

AA-3DNew

Agentic interactive 3D experiences, Elo

Code2Video-AANew

Product and brand videos designed in code, Elo

ITBench-AA

Kubernetes incident root-cause analysis

MLCR-AAUpdated

Medical long context reasoning

MMMU-Pro

Visual reasoning

AA-PersonalityBench: Expressiveness ScoreNew

Rich, varied, well-crafted language

AA-PersonalityBench: Organization ScoreNew

Well-structured, scannable, answer-first

AA-PersonalityBench: Transparency ScoreNew

Truthful, acknowledges uncertainty, non-sycophantic

AA-PersonalityBench: Slop ScoreNew

Use of filler and generic language

While model intelligence generally translates across use cases, specific evaluations may be more relevant for certain use cases.

AA-Briefcase v1.1

AA-Briefcase Elo

AA-Briefcase v1.1 is an agentic knowledge work benchmark developed by Artificial Analysis. AA-Briefcase Elo is a combined metric that aggregates rubric pass rate, analytical quality Elo and presentation Elo · Higher is better

AA-Briefcase Elo is a combined metric that aggregates analytical quality Elo, presentation Elo, and rubric pass rate, with rubric performance converted into Elo via synthetic head-to-head matches. Elo and 95% confidence interval bounds are clamped at 0.

AA-PersonalityBenchNew

Personality Indexes

Each axis is one of 8 personality indexes: the mean of its traits’ Elo z-scores, percentile ranked from 1 to 100 across all models evaluated in the benchmark

Openness Index

Artificial Analysis Openness Index: Score

Openness Index assesses model openness on a 0 to 100 normalized scale (higher is more open)

Intelligence Index Comparisons

Intelligence Index vs. Cost per Task

Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index · Weighted average cost (USD) per Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index task

Most attractive quadrant

Pareto line

AA-Briefcase v1.1

AutomationBench-AA

Cost per Task (USD, Log Scale)

Cost

Cost per Intelligence Index Task

Weighted average cost (USD) per Intelligence Index task · Segmented by token type · Lower is better

Cost to Run Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index

Cost (USD) to run all evaluations in the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index

The cost to run the evaluations in the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, calculated using the model's input, cache hit, cache write, reasoning, and answer token prices and the number of tokens used across evaluations (excluding repeats).

Pricing: Cache Hit, Input, and Output

Price (USD per M Tokens)

Price per token for cached prompts (previously processed), typically offering a significant discount compared to regular input price, represented as USD per million tokens. The values shown here are the cache hit price; cache write and cache storage are billed separately and vary by provider — see "Cache pricing by provider" for detail.

Context Window

Context window: tokens limit · Higher is better

Larger context windows are relevant to RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) LLM workflows which typically involve reasoning and information retrieval of large amounts of data.

Maximum number of combined input & output tokens. Output tokens commonly have a significantly lower limit (varied by model).

Speed

Measured by Output Speed (tokens per second)

Output Speed

Output tokens per second · Higher is better

Tokens per second received while the model is generating tokens (ie. after first chunk has been received from the API for models which support streaming).

Figures represent performance of the model's first-party API or the median across providers where a first-party API is not available.

Time per Intelligence Index Task

Weighted average decode time (minutes) per Intelligence Index task · Excludes TTFT and overhead time · Lower is better

The weighted average time (seconds) per Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index task. This is calculated by dividing output tokens per task by output speed, weighted by the relative weights of each benchmark in the Intelligence Index.

Latency

Measured by Time (seconds) to First Token

Latency: Time To First Answer Token

Seconds to first answer token received · Accounts for reasoning model 'thinking' time

Time to first answer token received, in seconds, after API request sent. For reasoning models, this includes the 'thinking' time of the model before providing an answer. For models which do not support streaming, this represents time to receive the completion.

End-to-End Response Time

Seconds to output 500 tokens, calculated based on time to first token, 'thinking' time for reasoning models, and output speed

End-to-End Response Time

Seconds to output 500 tokens, including reasoning model 'thinking' time · Lower is better

Seconds to receive a 500 token response. Key components:

Input time: Time to receive the first response token
Thinking time (only for reasoning models): Time reasoning models spend outputting tokens to reason prior to providing an answer. Amount of tokens based on the average reasoning tokens across a diverse set of 60 prompts (methodology details).
Answer time: Time to generate 500 output tokens, based on output speed

Figures represent performance of the model's first-party API or the median across providers where a first-party API is not available.

Model Size (Open Weights Models Only)

Model Size: Total and Active Parameters

Comparison between total model parameters and parameters active during inference (billions)

The total number of trainable weights and biases in the model, expressed in billions. These parameters are learned during training and determine the model's ability to process and generate responses.

The number of parameters actually executed during each inference forward pass, expressed in billions. For Mixture of Experts (MoE) models, a routing mechanism selects a subset of experts per token, resulting in fewer active than total parameters. Dense models use all parameters, so active equals total.

Frequently Asked Questions

Kimi K2.6 (Reasoning) is faster. Kimi K2.6 (Reasoning) generates 80.0 tokens per second, compared with Kimi K3 (Max) at 55.6 tokens per second.

Kimi K2.6 (Reasoning) is cheaper. Kimi K2.6 (Reasoning) costs $0.70 per 1M tokens, compared with Kimi K3 (Max) at $2.31 per 1M tokens (7:2:1 cache hit/input/output ratio).

Kimi K2.6 (Reasoning) has lower latency. Kimi K2.6 (Reasoning) has a time to first token of 2.64s, compared with Kimi K3 (Max) at 3.25s.

Kimi K3 (Max) has a larger context window. Kimi K3 (Max) supports 1.0M tokens, compared with Kimi K2.6 (Reasoning) at 260k tokens.

Kimi K3 (Max) vs. Kimi K2.6 (Reasoning)

Intelligence

Speed

Cost per Task

IntelligenceUpdated

Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index

Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index

Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index by Open Weights / Proprietary

Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index

Open Weights

Intelligence Index vs. Cost per Task

Cost per Intelligence Index Task

Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index

Benchmarks

Evaluations

Intelligence Evaluation Relevance

Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index

AA-Briefcase v1.1

AA-Briefcase Elo

AA-Briefcase Elo

AA-PersonalityBenchNew

Personality Indexes

Openness Index

Artificial Analysis Openness Index: Score

Intelligence Index Comparisons

Intelligence Index vs. Cost per Task

Cost per Intelligence Index Task

Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index

Cost

Cost per Intelligence Index Task

Cost per Intelligence Index Task

Cost to Run Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index

Cost to Run Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index

Pricing: Cache Hit, Input, and Output

Cache Hit

Context Window

Context Window

Context Window for RAG

Context Window

Speed

Output Speed

Output Speed

Model Performance Representation

Time per Intelligence Index Task

Time per Intelligence Index Task

Latency

Latency: Time To First Answer Token

Time to First Answer Token

End-to-End Response Time

End-to-End Response Time

End-to-End Response Time

Model Performance Representation

Model Size (Open Weights Models Only)

Model Size: Total and Active Parameters

Total Parameters

Active Parameters at Inference Time

Frequently Asked Questions

Which is faster, Kimi K3 (Max) or Kimi K2.6 (Reasoning)?

Which is cheaper, Kimi K3 (Max) or Kimi K2.6 (Reasoning)?

Which has lower latency, Kimi K3 (Max) or Kimi K2.6 (Reasoning)?

Which has a larger context window, Kimi K3 (Max) or Kimi K2.6 (Reasoning)?