Claude Haiku 4.5 vs Kimi K2 Thinking
Benchmarks, API pricing and specs, head to head. Data updated 2026-06-10.
Anthropic · Oct 2025
Anthropic's fast tier: Sonnet-4-class coding performance at $1/$5 and more than twice the speed.
Moonshot AI · Nov 2025
A trillion-parameter open reasoning agent that can chain 200–300 tool calls — the open-weights agentic standout of late 2025.
The verdict
Kimi K2 Thinking wins 2 of the 3 benchmarks these models share, against 1 for Claude Haiku 4.5. Kimi K2 Thinking is about 1.9x cheaper per blended million tokens (3:1 input:output mix). Kimi K2 Thinking also takes 262K of context versus 200K for Claude Haiku 4.5. And Kimi K2 Thinking is open-weights (Modified MIT), so it can be self-hosted — a structural advantage if data control or vendor independence matters.
Benchmark head-to-head 1–2
Specs & pricing
| Claude Haiku 4.5 | Kimi K2 Thinking | |
|---|---|---|
| modhub Index | — | 67.6 |
| Input price / 1M | $1 | $0.6 |
| Output price / 1M | $5 | $2.5 |
| Context window | 200K | 262K |
| Max output | 64K | — |
| Open weights | no | yes (Modified MIT) |
| Reasoning model | yes | yes |
| Multimodal input | text, image | text |
| Knowledge cutoff | Feb 2025 | Apr 2025 |
| Released | Oct 2025 | Nov 2025 |
| Example monthly cost* | $17.50 | $9.75 |
* 10M input + 1.5M output tokens per month at list prices, no caching. Green = better value on that row.
Frequently asked questions
- Which is better, Claude Haiku 4.5 or Kimi K2 Thinking?
- Kimi K2 Thinking wins 2 of the 3 benchmarks these models share, against 1 for Claude Haiku 4.5. Kimi K2 Thinking is about 1.9x cheaper per blended million tokens (3:1 input:output mix). Kimi K2 Thinking also takes 262K of context versus 200K for Claude Haiku 4.5. And Kimi K2 Thinking is open-weights (Modified MIT), so it can be self-hosted — a structural advantage if data control or vendor independence matters.
- Which is cheaper, Claude Haiku 4.5 or Kimi K2 Thinking?
- Claude Haiku 4.5 costs $1/$5 per million input/output tokens, while Kimi K2 Thinking costs $0.6/$2.5. For a typical workload of 10M input and 1.5M output tokens per month, that's $17.50 versus $9.75.
- Which model is better for coding, Claude Haiku 4.5 or Kimi K2 Thinking?
- On SWE-bench Verified — the standard agentic-coding benchmark — Claude Haiku 4.5 scores 73.3% versus 71.3% for Kimi K2 Thinking, making Claude Haiku 4.5 the stronger pick for coding agents.