@starmexxx: a moonshot engineer leaked the benchmark anthropic, openai and xai all buried the same week: kimi k3 beat opus 5, gpt-5…
Summary
A leaked benchmark suggests Kimi K3 outperforms major AI models like Opus 5 and GPT-5.6 at a fraction of the cost, leading companies to remove comparison charts from their sites.
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Cached at: 08/21/26, 05:18 PM
a moonshot engineer leaked the benchmark anthropic, openai and xai all buried the same week: kimi k3 beat opus 5, gpt-5.6 and grok 4.6 at $0.94 a task. stop paying anthropic $200 a month for opus 5 and openai $200 for gpt-5.6 when kimi does the same work for $8
the leak showed kimi k3 winning 9 of 12 categories against opus 5, gpt-5.6 and grok 4.6. within 48 hours all three labs quietly pushed pricing pages and one very specific comparison chart off their sites. nobody announced anything. they just deleted, which tells you everything
the four numbers they scrubbed:
cost per task · $0.94 vs $1.80 -> opus 5 charges $1.80 to finish one task. gpt-5.6 $1.04. grok 4.6 $0.61. kimi k3 $0.94 and it landed 487 of 500 clean -> anthropic is billing you double for a model that lost the benchmark it paid to promote
the weights · free, sitting on huggingface right now -> the entire model is a public download. pull it, keep it, run it forever, nobody can switch it off -> a model you can hold cannot be rented at $200 a month. that single fact is what three labs deleted a chart over
the switch · one line of bash -> moonshot ships an anthropic-compatible endpoint. one env variable and claude code points at kimi -> same cli, same keybindings, same /model. you change a url, opus 5 never knows it lost the seat
the bill · $400 down to $8 -> opus 5 max plus gpt-5.6 pro is $400 a month. kimi runs the same daily work for $8 metered -> that is a 98% cut for output that beat both of them 9 categories to 3
here is the part they will fight me on: the frontier tax died the week this leaked and all three labs know it. once the weights are public the price has a ceiling, because anyone can serve the same model. anthropic, openai and xai are charging 2025 prices on a lead that ended in a benchmark they deleted instead of answered
drop your $400/mo ai stack to $8. the run above is kimi k3 finishing the task opus 5 bills $1.80 for. the full breakdown is in the article below
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