Kimi K2.6 is live on Kyma

April 21, 20264 min read

Update, 2026-09-14. kimi-k2.5 was retired on 2026-09-11 and is no longer served on Kyma, so the option below to stay on K2.5 no longer applies. Use kimi-k2.6.

Kimi K2.6

Moonshot shipped Kimi K2.6 on April 20, 2026. We rolled it onto Kyma the next day. If you use the agent or best-agent alias, you're already on it.

What changed

K2.6 is Moonshot's open-source agentic flagship. The things that matter for builders:

•256K context across all variants (we expose 262,144 tokens on Kyma)
•Native multimodal — text + image input, text output
•Agent swarms scaled 3× — 300 sub-agents orchestrated over 4,000+ coordinated steps (K2.5 topped out at 100 agents / 1,500 steps)
•Long-horizon execution — Moonshot designed it to hold a plan together across ~12 hours of work
•Modified MIT license on both code and weights

Benchmarks (Moonshot's own numbers)

These are from Moonshot's official release tech blog — not our measurements. We'll publish independent numbers once we have real production traffic.

Benchmark	K2.6	Claude Opus 4.6	GPT-5.4	Gemini 3.1 Pro	K2.5
SWE-Bench Verified	80.2	80.8	—	80.6	76.8
SWE-Bench Pro	58.6	53.4	57.7	54.2	50.7
Terminal-Bench 2.0	66.7	65.4	65.4	68.5	50.8
LiveCodeBench v6	89.6	88.8	—	91.7	85.0
BrowseComp	83.2	83.7	82.7	85.9	74.9
Toolathlon	50.0	47.2	54.6	48.8	27.8
HLE-Full (w/ tools)	54.0	53.0	52.1	51.4	50.2
DeepSearchQA (f1)	92.5	91.3	78.6	81.9	89.0

Bold = K2.6 leads. The pattern to read: K2.6 is essentially tied with Claude Opus 4.6 on SWE-Bench Verified (80.2 vs 80.8), ahead on SWE-Bench Pro (harder, multi-step problems), and substantially ahead of its own prior generation on anything agent-shaped. It's behind Gemini 3.1 Pro on some raw benchmarks but comparable once you turn on tool use.

The K2.5 → K2.6 jump on Toolathlon (27.8 → 50.0) is the number we'd pay the most attention to — it measures how reliable the model is across long chains of tool calls, which is where cheap models fall apart in real agent workloads.

Pricing on Kyma

	Per 1M tokens
Input	$1.28
Output	$5.40

For reference, K2.5 stays at $0.68 / $3.78. K2.6 is the premium option — you're paying for the agent-swarm improvements, not raw throughput.

No per-provider disclosure — we route through whichever upstream is cheapest and healthy, and your price is fixed regardless of which inference backend actually served your request. If the primary dies, we fall over to a secondary automatically (4-layer routing).

How to use it

Easiest — use the alias, auto-upgrade to future flagships:

from openai import OpenAI

client = OpenAI(base_url="https://kymaapi.com/v1", api_key="kyma-...")

response = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="agent",  # → kimi-k2.6
    messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Refactor the settle_request RPC to write to transactions"}],
    tools=[...]
)

Pin the exact version if you need reproducibility:

response = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="kimi-k2.6",
    messages=[...],
    tools=[...]
)

Heads up on max_tokens. K2.6 is a reasoning model — it spends completion tokens on reasoning_content before emitting the final content. If you set max_tokens: 20 and the model spends 30 tokens thinking, you'll get an empty content field. Give it at least 200 tokens of headroom for any non-trivial query, more for multi-step agent work.

Upgrading from K2.5

If you were already using "model": "agent", no change — you're already on K2.6. The alias map updated when we shipped.

If you hardcoded "model": "kimi-k2.5", you have two choices:

•Recommended: switch to "model": "kimi-k2.6" (or "model": "agent").
•Stay on K2.5: keep it. K2.5 is still a first-class active model on Kyma, same routing, same SLA.

We won't deprecate K2.5 without notice. The family page at /models/text/moonshot documents both.

What's next

We're watching K2.6's production behavior over the next week — primary route stability, tail latency on long agent runs, cache behavior. If anything changes (e.g., we swap primary providers, add prompt caching when it becomes available), the model page at /models/kimi-k2.6 stays current.

If you want to compare on your own workload: sign in at kymaapi.com, the $0.50 of free credit on signup spends on the free tier, which is where you can stress-test before committing.