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

Which is better for the money: Claude Sonnet 5 (Max) by Anthropic or Kimi K3 (Max) by Kimi? Intelligence, total benchmark cost, and end-to-end time from Artificial Analysis & other sources, snapshot 2026-10-24.

Clear winner

AnthropicClaude Sonnet 5 (Max)Off the frontier

Intelligence: 38.20
Total cost: $6998

KimiKimi K3 (Max)Off the frontier

Intelligence: 43.60
Total cost: $3658

Verdict

Pick Kimi K3 (Max)

Kimi K3 (Max) vs Claude Sonnet 5 (Max): 14.1% more intelligence, 47.7% less cost to run the AA benchmark, and 65.6% faster end-to-end.

Metric	Claude Sonnet 5 (Max)	Kimi K3 (Max)	Difference
Intelligence (higher is better)	38.2	43.6	+14.1% Kimi K3 (Max) is 14.1% more intelligent
Total AA cost (lower is better)	$6,998.25	$3,658.07	−47.7% Kimi K3 (Max) is 47.7% cheaper
End-to-end time (lower is better)	183.62s	63.08s	−65.6% Kimi K3 (Max) is 65.6% faster
Price per 1M tokens (in / out)	$2.00 / $10.0	$3.00 / $15.0
Input modalities	Text, Image	Text, Image

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

Today's Pareto frontier

Against the frontier

Claude Sonnet 5 (Max) is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, Claude Opus 5.5 (Xhigh, Default Fallback) scores 56.00 for $4057.
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 (Max)Kimi K3 (Max)Today's Pareto frontierOpen-weights frontierEvery other model

Matchup

Compare something else

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