Kimi K2.6 also released today. I think it's fair to compare the two models.

Qwen appears to be much more expensive:

- Qwen: $1.3 in / $7.8 out

- Kimi: $0.95 in / $4 out

--

The announcement posts only share two overlapping benchmark results. Qwen appears to score slightly lower on SWE-Bench Pro and Terminal-Bench 2.0.

Qwen:

- Teminal-Bench 2.0: 65.4

- SWE-Bench Pro: 57.3

Kimi:

- Terminal-Bench 2.0: 66.8

- SWE-Bench Pro: 58.6

--

Different models have different strong suits, and benchmarks don't cover everything. But from a numbers perspective, Kimi looks much more appealing.

i think as the pricing has gone up on the Chinese models it has made them less appealing, and with the introduction of Gemma-4 not many are at the pareto frontier (also in my experience, not just the stats): https://arena.ai/leaderboard/text/overall?viewBy=plot