Kimi K2.6 on QuickSilver Pro
Kimi K2.6 is Moonshot's April 2026 frontier release positioned for Opus-class agentic and long-horizon planning workloads. On QuickSilver Pro it's $0.584 input / $2.79 output per 1M tokens, ~20% below OpenRouter's $0.73 / $3.49. There's no clean OpenAI analog — if your evals are picking Claude Opus or GPT-5 for agentic depth, K2.6 is the open-source comparable at a fraction of the per-token price.
At a glance
Long-horizon agentic / planning workloads where Opus-class depth matters.
Pricing comparison ($/1M tokens)
| Provider | Input | Output | vs QSP |
|---|---|---|---|
| QuickSilver Pro | $0.58 | $2.79 | cheapest |
| OpenRouter (moonshotai/kimi-k2.6) | $0.73 | $3.49 | 20% cheaper |
When to use
Multi-step planning agents that need to coordinate tools across long horizons, research / analyst agents that synthesize across many documents, complex code-review or refactor agents that plan before acting, and any workload where DeepSeek R1's pure-math reasoning isn't the same as K2.6's agentic / long-context planning. The 256K context fits a substantial codebase or research corpus.
When to use something else
For routine chat, coding, or short-context tasks, K2.6 is overpriced — use V4 Flash or V3. For pure mathematical reasoning, R1 wins. For closed-model strengths (vision, native tool ecosystem), Claude or OpenAI.
Quickstart (curl)
curl https://api.quicksilverpro.io/v1/chat/completions \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $QSP_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{
"model": "kimi-k2.6",
"messages": [{"role": "user", "content": "Hello!"}]
}'OpenAI-compatible. Same model as OpenRouter; one-line migration via base_url.
FAQ
On the evals Moonshot published with the April 2026 release, K2.6 lands within striking distance of Claude Opus 4 on agentic tool-use benchmarks (Tau-bench, SWE-bench Verified) and ahead on long-context retrieval. Match on your own evals before committing — Opus has been finetuned in production longer and may still win on subjective quality for some tasks. If your selection process picks Opus, K2.6 is the open-source alternative worth A/B testing.
K2.6 is a frontier-tier model and Moonshot's serving cost reflects that. We pass through ~20% below OpenRouter ($0.73 / $3.49) but the underlying compute is genuinely more expensive than V3/V4 Flash. For Opus-class workloads, $2.79/M output is still a meaningful discount compared to Claude Opus 4 at ~$75/M output — about 27x cheaper per token.
Yes — K2.6 is an OpenAI-compatible chat completions endpoint on QuickSilver Pro. Set base_url=https://api.quicksilverpro.io/v1, paste your QSP key, use model="kimi-k2.6". Streaming, tool calling, json_schema strict mode, and usage.cost accounting all work. K2.6 thinks by default; pass `reasoning: { enabled: false }` for non-thinking output (though for the workloads K2.6 is built for, you usually want the thinking trace).