Kimi K2.6 is Moonshot AI's April 2026 iteration on the K2 line, positioned squarely as an open-weight coding and agent model. Its headline claim, echoed across launch coverage: tying GPT-5.5 — OpenAI's proprietary flagship — on major coding benchmarks while remaining downloadable under the K2 line's Modified MIT license.
K2.6 continues the trajectory K2.5 set: rapid releases, agent-first design, and pricing pressure on closed platforms. For teams already on the Moonshot stack it is the current default; specs below reflect what Moonshot has published, and this page updates as fuller documentation lands.
Kimi K2.6 specifications
| Vendor | Moonshot AI (China) |
|---|---|
| Architecture | Mixture-of-Experts agent model (K2 line) |
| Total parameters | 1T |
| Active parameters | 32B |
| Context window | — |
| Modalities | text, image |
| License | Modified MIT — free commercial use; attribution required above 100M monthly active users or $20M monthly revenue |
| Release date | 2026-04-15 |
| Weights | Hugging Face · GitHub |
Benchmarks and reported results
| Benchmark | Result | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Coding benchmarks | ≈ GPT-5.5 tier | ties OpenAI's proprietary flagship on headline coding evals per April 2026 coverage |
Running Kimi K2.6 locally
Same class as the rest of the K2 line: trillion-parameter MoE, multi-node or H200-class self-hosting, INT4 builds in the ~600GB range. API and hosted providers are the practical route.
What Kimi K2.6 is best for
- Open-weight coding at proprietary-flagship level
- Agentic software-engineering workflows on the Moonshot stack
Frequently asked questions
What's new in Kimi K2.6 versus K2.5?
K2.6 (April 2026) is a coding- and agent-focused iteration that closes the remaining gap to proprietary flagships on software-engineering benchmarks — launch coverage has it tying GPT-5.5 on headline coding evals. K2.5 (January 2026) remains the multimodal generalist with video understanding.
Is Kimi K2.6 free to use commercially?
Yes, under the K2 line's Modified MIT license — free commercial use, with attribution required only above 100M monthly active users or $20M monthly revenue.