Claude Sonnet 5 (High) vs Kimi K3 (Max)

Which is better for the money: Claude Sonnet 5 (High) by Anthropic or Kimi K3 (Max) by Kimi? Intelligence, total benchmark cost, and end-to-end time from Artificial Analysis & other sources, snapshot 2026-10-25.

Trade-off

AnthropicClaude Sonnet 5 (High)Off the frontier

Intelligence: 31.70
Total cost: $2086

KimiKimi K3 (Max)Off the frontier

Intelligence: 43.60
Total cost: $3658

Verdict

Depends on your budget

Kimi K3 (Max) scores 11.9 points higher (43.6 vs 31.7) but costs 1.8× as much to run the benchmark ($3658 vs $2086; both flagship class). Pick Kimi K3 (Max) when the extra intelligence is worth the premium, otherwise Claude Sonnet 5 (High).

Metric	Claude Sonnet 5 (High)	Kimi K3 (Max)	Difference
Intelligence (higher is better)	31.7	43.6	+37.5% Kimi K3 (Max) is 37.5% more intelligent
Total AA cost (lower is better)	$2,086.04	$3,658.07	+75.4% Kimi K3 (Max) is 75.4% more expensive
End-to-end time (lower is better)	14.79s	58.57s	+296.0% Kimi K3 (Max) is 296.0% slower
Price per 1M tokens (in / out)	$2.00 / $10.0	$3.00 / $15.0
Input modalities	Text, Image	Text, Image

Kimi K3 (Max) vs Claude Sonnet 5 (High): 37.5% more intelligence, 75.4% more cost to run the AA benchmark, and 296.0% slower end-to-end.

Open this matchup in the interactive picker Claude Sonnet 5 (High): what beats it Kimi K3 (Max): what beats it

Today's Pareto frontier

Against the frontier

Claude Sonnet 5 (High) is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, GPT-6.1 Sol (Max) scores 51.80 for $1082.
Kimi K3 (Max) is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, Kimi K3.1 Pro scores 55.10 for $3117.

Claude Sonnet 5 (High)Kimi K3 (Max)Today's Pareto frontierOpen-weights frontierEvery other model

Matchup

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Agents: Accept: text/markdown or ?format=md returns this page as Markdown. JSON: /api/v1/compare/claude-sonnet-5-high/kimi-k3 · Markdown: /api/v1/compare/claude-sonnet-5-high/kimi-k3?format=md · llms.txt · agent skill