K2.6-code-preview was a minor, but noticeable jump, especially in a long running testing task and prior Moonshot releases have been the only models that I'd consider a suitably competitive replacement for Anthropic models. The way they approach tool calls, task inference and adherence is far closer than any other providers output, similar to how GLM models map far more closely to OpenAIs releases. Whether task adherence, task assessment, task evaluation or task inference, K2.5 got closer to Opus 4.5 than any other model (but was still behind overall).

I will have to test this full release of K2.6 but could see it serve as a very good overall drop-in replacement for Opus 4.5 and Opus 4.6 at 200k across the vast majority of tasks.

I will say however that Opus 4.7 Max 1M has been a very significant jump in performance for me, especially in tasks beyond 120k token where I'd argue it is now the most reliable model in continued task adherence and tool calling without compaction. Ironically, my initial experience was less than pleasant as on XHigh I found task adherence to have regressed even with less than 1/10th of the context window having been used.

Am very interested in K2.6s compaction strategy (which appears to be very simply all things considered) and how it performs beyond 100k tokens. As it stands, only OpenAI models have made compaction for long running tasks work well, though overall, GPT-5.4 is still inferior in my tests regardless of context window over other models such as Opus 4.6 1m and Opus 4.7 1m. Haven't gotten around to testing Opus 4.7 200k and will have to do this to properly assess K2.6 fairly, but I'd be very surprised if K2.6 truly beat Opus 4.7 200k given the jump I have experienced.