Claude Opus 5 vs Kimi K3
Anthropic's flagship against Moonshot AI's 2.8-trillion-parameter open-weight giant. Compare price per million tokens, coding benchmarks, context, and self-hosting.
Comparing 2 models · Prices last verified
Verdict
Kimi K3 is dramatically cheaper — $3/$15 per million tokens versus Opus 5's $5/$25, and just $0.30 per million on cache hits — with a slightly larger 1.05M context and open weights you can self-host. It ranked first on Arena's Frontier Code evaluation. But Moonshot itself concedes K3 sits behind Opus 5's frontier tier on overall capability, and Opus 5 leads clearly on long-horizon agentic reliability and alignment. Take K3 for high-volume or self-hosted workloads where cost dominates; take Opus 5 when the hardest 10% of tasks decide the outcome.
Pricing Comparison
| Model | Provider | Input / 1M | Output / 1M | Context | Tier |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Claude Opus 5Best value | Anthropic | $5.00 | $25.00 | 1M | flagship |
| Kimi K3 | Moonshot AI | $3.00 | $15.00 | 1M | balanced |
Model Breakdown
Anthropic
$5.00
per 1M input
Claude Opus 5 is Anthropic's flagship model, released July 24, 2026. It reaches close to Claude Fable 5's frontier intelligence at half the price, and holds the same $5/$25 per-million pricing as Opus 4.8 while more than doubling its agentic coding score. It tops Frontier-Bench v0.1 (43.3%), ARC-AGI-3 (30.2%, roughly 4x the next best model), and Artificial Analysis' GDPval-AA v2 knowledge-work leaderboard (1,861 Elo). It is also Anthropic's most aligned Opus model to date.
Moonshot AI
$3.00
per 1M input
Kimi K3 is a 2.8T parameter open-weight multimodal reasoning model from Moonshot AI.
Our Verdict
Kimi K3 is dramatically cheaper — $3/$15 per million tokens versus Opus 5's $5/$25, and just $0.30 per million on cache hits — with a slightly larger 1.05M context and open weights you can self-host. It ranked first on Arena's Frontier Code evaluation. But Moonshot itself concedes K3 sits behind Opus 5's frontier tier on overall capability, and Opus 5 leads clearly on long-horizon agentic reliability and alignment. Take K3 for high-volume or self-hosted workloads where cost dominates; take Opus 5 when the hardest 10% of tasks decide the outcome.
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