Kimi K2.6
Key facts
- Released
- Apr 20, 2026
- What it does
- Text and chat: Writes, answers questions and holds a conversation.Thinks first: Can reason step by step before it answers: slower, but better at maths, code and tricky questions.Sees images: Understands pictures, screenshots and charts you share with it.Watches video: Understands video clips you share with it.
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- Knowledge cutoff
- January 2025 · the latest events it learned about
- How
- Free to download
- Size
- Parameters: The numbers a model learns during training: a rough measure of its size. Bigger usually means more capable, but slower and pricier to run. 7B means 7 billion.
- Announced as
- “Kimi K2.6: From Code to Creation, From One to Many”
From trckr's archive of releases before it started watching. Date and details from Epoch AI's database of AI models (CC BY 4.0).
Price and limits
What developers pay to use it through the API: How developers plug a model into their own apps and pay per use. A model that's "in the API" can be used by programmers, even if it isn't in a chat app yet., per million Tokens: The small chunks of text a model reads and writes, about three-quarters of a word each. Prices and limits are counted in tokens. sent (input) or written back (output), and how much it can take in at once.
- Input
- $0.95
- per million tokensCached: $0.16
- Output
- $4.00
- per million tokens
- Context window: How much a model can keep in mind at once: your question, any files you share and its own replies. Measured in tokens; 1,000 tokens is about 750 words.
- 262K tokens
- about 200,000 words
From the lab's own listing on models.dev and OpenRouter, checked .
How it scores
From independent testers, never the lab's own claims.
- Chat answers, by people's votes#52 of 86
- Gemini 4 Carbon1,527
- 2Gemini 4 Argon1,522
- 51Claude Sonnet 51,461
- 52Kimi K2.61,461
- 53Qwen3.6-Max-Preview1,460
Source: LMArena · LMArena text, adjusted for style
Compare Kimi K2.6 with
It came out 83 days after Kimi K2.5, the lab's previous model.
The details
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