Claude Opus 5 vs Kimi Linear 48B A3B Instruct
Compare Claude Opus 5 by Anthropic against Kimi Linear 48B A3B Instruct by Moonshot AI, context windows of 1.0M vs 1.0M, tested across 34 shared challenges.
Our Verdict
Claude Opus 5
Kimi Linear 48B A3B InstructRunner-up
No community votes yet. On paper, Claude Opus 5 has the edge — newer, major provider backing.
Kimi Linear 48B A3B Instruct is 42x cheaper per token — worth considering if cost matters.
Too close to call
API pricing
Cost per 1M tokens
Claude Opus 5
Input
$5.00
Output
$25.00
Kimi Linear 48B A3B Instruct
Input
$0.30
17× cheaper
Output
$0.60
42× cheaper
Kimi Linear 48B A3B Instruct is cheaper on both — 17× input, 42× output
Writing DNA
Style Comparison
Similarity
75%
Claude Opus 5 uses 1.7x more emoji
Claude Opus 5
Kimi Linear 48B A3B Instruct
54%Vocabulary63%
21wSentence Length15w
0.40Hedging0.19
3.9Bold5.2
1.9Lists3.2
0.02Emoji0.00
0.71Headings0.38
0.05Transitions0.05
Based on 27 + 14 text responses
Research
What we learned reading every model
FAQ
