Alibaba's Qwen3.6-Max-Preview and Moonshot AI's Kimi K2.6 were released within a 24-hour window on April 20–21, 2026. A side-by-side look at specs, benchmarks, distribution, and agent-side features for the two flagships.
Cursor released Composer 2 without disclosing its base model; calling its OpenAI-compatible API revealed it is Kimi K2.5. This escalated into a licensing dispute, but a formal commercial agreement with Moonshot AI was subsequently confirmed.
AttnRes to replace Transformer's fixed residual combination with softmax attention in the depth direction. Demonstration with Kimi Linear 48B improved GPQA-Diamond +7.5pt and HumanEval +3.1pt. Training overhead was kept below 4% and inference below 2%.
