Claude Sonnet 4 vs Kimi Linear
Anthropic Claude Sonnet 4 | Moonshot AI Kimi Linear | |
|---|---|---|
| Overview | ||
| Company | Anthropic | Moonshot AI |
| Release date | May 22 2025 | 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. | 30% | — |
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. | 72.7% | — |
Science GPQA DiamondGraduate-level science questions in biology, physics, and chemistry — hard enough that subject-matter PhDs score around 65%. Higher is better. | 75.4% | — |
| Timeline | ||
| Release gap | Claude Sonnet 4 shipped 132 days before Kimi Linear | |
Which is better: Claude Sonnet 4 or Kimi Linear?
Claude Sonnet 4 and Kimi Linear don't publish scores on any of the same benchmarks, so there's no direct head-to-head comparison. Claude Sonnet 4 shipped 132 days before Kimi Linear, so benchmark comparisons should account for the intervening progress.
Claude Sonnet 4 is proprietary, while Kimi Linear is open weight.
Direct benchmark comparisons are unavailable — Claude Sonnet 4 and Kimi Linear don't publish scores on any of the same benchmarks.
Frequently asked questions
Claude Sonnet 4 was released by Anthropic on May 22 2025.
Kimi Linear was released by Moonshot AI on Oct 2025.
Claude Sonnet 4 is a proprietary model released by Anthropic. Kimi Linear is an open weight model released by Moonshot AI.
Other comparisons
Claude Sonnet 4 vs GPT-5.6 SolKimi Linear vs GPT-5.6 SolClaude Sonnet 4 vs Gemini OmniKimi Linear vs Gemini OmniClaude Sonnet 4 vs Muse Spark 1.1Kimi Linear vs Muse Spark 1.1Claude Sonnet 4 vs Grok 4.5Kimi Linear vs Grok 4.5Claude Sonnet 4 vs DeepSeek-V4-ProKimi Linear vs DeepSeek-V4-ProClaude Sonnet 4 vs Mistral Medium 3.5Kimi Linear vs Mistral Medium 3.5