GPT-5.6 Sol vs Kimi K3
OpenAI vs Moonshot AI · Prices checked 12 August 2026
Kimi K3 is 47 per cent cheaper on blended cost, $6.60 per million tokens against $12.50. A single 100K-input, 10K-output job costs $0.450 on Kimi K3 against $0.800 on GPT-5.6 Sol.
GPT-5.6 Sol takes a 1,050,000-token context window against 1,049,000, giving a modest edge for long documents or whole-codebase work. GPT-5.6 Sol was released Jul 2026; Kimi K3 Jul 2026.
Pricing and capacity
| Metric | GPT-5.6 Sol | Kimi K3 | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Input / 1M tokens | $5.00 | $3.00 | 40% |
| Output / 1M tokens | $30.00 | $15.00 | 2.0× |
| Blended · 70/30calculated | $12.50 | $6.60 | 47% |
| Blended · 50/50calculated | $17.50 | $9.00 | 49% |
| Blended · 80/20calculated | $10.00 | $5.40 | 46% |
| Blended · 20/80calculated | $25.00 | $12.60 | 50% |
| Job cost · 100K + 10Kcalculated | $0.800 | $0.450 | 44% |
| Job cost · 1M + 100Kcalculated | $8.00 | $4.50 | 44% |
| Context window | 1,050,000 | 1,049,000 | 0% |
Input and output rates are as published by each provider. Blended and job-cost rows are calculated comparison metrics, not published prices — how they are derived.
Benchmarks
These two models do not currently report scores on any of the same benchmark suites, so there is no like-for-like capability comparison to show. Rather than pad the page with one-sided numbers, the benchmark leaderboards list every score we do hold.
What each model is for
GPT-5.6 Sol
OpenAI · Frontier
The flagship tier of the GPT-5.6 family, aimed at complex reasoning, long-horizon agentic work, coding, biology and cybersecurity. In OpenAI's naming the number is the generation and Sol is a durable capability tier, so Sol advances on its own cadence rather than being replaced by the next decimal. Standard short-context pricing is $5/$30 per MTok with cached input at $0.50; requests above 272K tokens are billed at the long-context rate of $10/$45.
- Frontier reasoning
- Long-horizon agentic execution
- Coding and code review
- Programmatic tool calling in the Responses API
Kimi K3
Moonshot AI · Frontier
Moonshot AI's 2.7-trillion-parameter flagship, released in July 2026 as the largest open-weight model published to date and the first Chinese model widely treated as competitive with the top US frontier systems. It runs an always-on reasoning mode Moonshot calls "thinking mode", handles a 1M-token context window, and understands images natively. Two variants shipped: K3 Max for chat and agent work, K3 Swarm Max for large-scale parallel processing.
- Largest open-weight model released to date (2.7T parameters)
- Always-on "thinking mode" reasoning
- 1M-token context
- Native visual understanding
Frequently asked questions
Which is cheaper, GPT-5.6 Sol or Kimi K3?
Kimi K3 is 47 per cent cheaper on blended cost, $6.60 per million tokens against $12.50. A single 100K-input, 10K-output job costs $0.450 on Kimi K3 against $0.800 on GPT-5.6 Sol. Blended cost weights input at 70% and output at 30%; price your own token split for an exact answer, since the cheaper model on a blended basis is not always cheaper for your workload.
Which has the larger context window, GPT-5.6 Sol or Kimi K3?
GPT-5.6 Sol takes a 1,050,000-token context window against 1,049,000, giving a modest edge for long documents or whole-codebase work. The context window caps everything in a single request: prompt, retrieved documents, conversation history and the model’s own output all share it.
Can I compare GPT-5.6 Sol and Kimi K3 on my own numbers?
Yes. Open both in the side-by-side comparison tool to see every field at once, or use the token calculator to price your actual prompt and monthly request volume against each model. Both are free and need no sign-up.
Price it for your own workload
Related matchups
Terms used on this page
Prices and scores are recomputed on every deploy from the catalogue. Prices checked 12 August 2026.