Claude Opus 4.6 vs Kimi Linear
Anthropic Claude Opus 4.6 | Moonshot AI Kimi Linear | |
|---|---|---|
| Overview | ||
| Company | Anthropic | Moonshot AI |
| Release date | Feb 5 2026 | Oct 2025 |
| Access | Proprietary | Open Weight |
| Specifications | ||
Parameters | — | 48B |
| Benchmarks | ||
Nonsense detection BullshitBench v2Given a confidently-worded but nonsensical prompt, does the AI spot that it makes no sense and push back — instead of playing along and inventing an answer? The score is how often it clearly called out the nonsense. Higher is better. | 87% | — |
Coding SWE-Bench VerifiedReal coding tasks pulled from open-source projects — the AI has to find and fix actual bugs. A human-checked version of the original SWE-Bench. Higher is better. | 80.8% | — |
Next.js coding Next.js EvalsVercel's open eval of how well AI coding agents build and migrate real Next.js apps — measured as the share of tasks the agent completes successfully. Higher is better. | 75% | — |
Web browsing BrowseCompCan the AI browse the web and track down hard-to-find answers? Higher is better. | 83.7% | — |
Multidisciplinary reasoning Humanity's Last Exam · with toolsHumanity's Last Exam — extremely hard expert questions across many subjects. “With tools” means the AI is allowed to search the web or run code while answering. Higher is better. | 53% | — |
Science GPQA DiamondGraduate-level science questions in biology, physics, and chemistry — hard enough that subject-matter PhDs score around 65%. Higher is better. | 91.3% | — |
Community preference Arena Elo (Text)Real people chat with two anonymous AIs side by side and vote for the answer they prefer. Votes become a chess-style Elo rating on arena.ai — it measures which AI people actually like, not test scores. Higher is better. | 1504 | — |
Community preference (code) Arena Elo (Code)Like the text arena, but people vote on which AI writes better code. The votes become a chess-style Elo rating on arena.ai. Higher is better. | 1543 | — |
| Timeline | ||
| Release gap | Kimi Linear shipped 127 days before Claude Opus 4.6 | |
Which is better: Claude Opus 4.6 or Kimi Linear?
Claude Opus 4.6 and Kimi Linear don't publish scores on any of the same benchmarks, so there's no direct head-to-head comparison. Kimi Linear shipped 127 days before Claude Opus 4.6, so benchmark comparisons should account for the intervening progress.
Claude Opus 4.6 is proprietary, while Kimi Linear is open weight.
Direct benchmark comparisons are unavailable — Claude Opus 4.6 and Kimi Linear don't publish scores on any of the same benchmarks.
Frequently asked questions
Claude Opus 4.6 was released by Anthropic on Feb 5 2026.
Kimi Linear was released by Moonshot AI on Oct 2025.
Claude Opus 4.6 is a proprietary model released by Anthropic. Kimi Linear is an open weight model released by Moonshot AI.
Other comparisons
Claude Opus 4.6 vs GPT-5.6 SolKimi Linear vs GPT-5.6 SolClaude Opus 4.6 vs Gemini OmniKimi Linear vs Gemini OmniClaude Opus 4.6 vs Muse Spark 1.1Kimi Linear vs Muse Spark 1.1Claude Opus 4.6 vs Grok 4.5Kimi Linear vs Grok 4.5Claude Opus 4.6 vs DeepSeek-V4-ProKimi Linear vs DeepSeek-V4-ProClaude Opus 4.6 vs Mistral Medium 3.5Kimi Linear vs Mistral Medium 3.5