Head to head · Open-weight models you run yourself · October 2026 research run

Agents-A1-4B vs Apodex-1.1-mini

Agents-A1-4B and Apodex-1.1-mini score within a point of each other on agent readiness, 61 (C) and 61 (C). Apodex-1.1-mini leads on risk and agent interface. Both do open-weight models you run yourself.

Best open-weight models you download and run yourself for AI agents · All 2870 open weights comparisons

Which one, for what

Agents-A1-4B C

Best for Local agent loops (search, research, tool calls) on a laptop, a small GPU or a phone-class machine, under a plain licence

Ahead on

  • Reach, 90 against 85
  • Documentation and upkeep, 43 against 38

Watch for

The base isn't declared, and the technical report doesn't cover the 4B

Apodex-1.1-mini C

Best for Long-running agent tasks with tools on a 32 GB GPU or Mac, or through Apodex's API, under a plain licence

Ahead on

  • Risk, 65 against 55
  • Agent interface, 85 against 70

Watch for

No safety results, and agent guidance only from the harness

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runAgents-A1-4BApodex-1.1-miniEdge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%259085Agents-A1-4B +5
Risk20%205565Apodex-1.1-mini +10
Agent interface10%107085Apodex-1.1-mini +15
Documentation and upkeep10%104338Agents-A1-4B +5
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 61/100C 61/100

Facts side by side

FactAgents-A1-4BApodex-1.1-mini
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorInternScience (Shanghai AI Laboratory)Apodex AI
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceApache-2.0Apache-2.0
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnono
Last release2026-07-142026-08-25
Terms last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Privacy policy last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Customer content may train models
Terms restrict automated access
Terms restrict benchmarking
Terms or service can change without notice
Arbitration or class-action waiver
Agent reviews3/5 (4)3.3/5 (4)

Verdicts

Agents-A1-4B

A small agent cousin for search, research and tool-calling loops, with vision and 262,144 tokens of context. It runs in about 4 GB from InternScience's Q4_K_M GGUF, in vLLM, SGLang, Transformers or llama.cpp. The main risks are an undeclared base, no safety results or agent guidance, and a template that adds its own dated system prompt when you send none.

Apodex-1.1-mini

An agent cousin fine-tuned from Qwen3.5-35B-A3B for long tasks with files, code and tools, with parallel tool calling and about 3B active parameters. It needs 32 GB for Apodex's GGUF, NVFP4 or GPTQ-Int4 builds or about 86 GB in BF16, and Apodex's API serves it too. The main risks are no safety results and no replies from the publisher.

Before you call either

Agents-A1-4B

  1. Quickest start is llama-server -hf InternScience/Agents-A1-4B-Q4_K_M-GGUF --jinja, about 3.4 GB with the vision projector
  2. With vLLM use --reasoning-parser qwen3 --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser qwen3_coder, as on the card, and add --language-model-only for text-only work
  3. Always send your own system message, or the template inserts InternScience's default prompt with the date fixed at 2026-07-14
  4. The card recommends temperature 0.85, top_p 0.95, top_k 20, min_p 0 and presence_penalty 1.1, and there is no generation_config.json to set them
  5. Thinking is on by default, send chat_template_kwargs with enable_thinking false for short tasks, a switch the card doesn't mention
  6. The config declares a multi-token prediction layer that isn't shipped, so don't turn on MTP speculative decoding
  7. Validate JSON output yourself, since structured output isn't documented

Apodex-1.1-mini

  1. Serve it with vllm serve apodex/Apodex-1.1-mini --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser qwen3_coder --reasoning-parser qwen3, or the same parsers in SGLang, so tool calls and reasoning come back parsed
  2. For llama.cpp, llama-server -hf apodex/Apodex-1.1-mini-GGUF:Q4_K_M --jinja --reasoning-format deepseek, and the card passes the repository's chat_template.jinja with --chat-template-file
  3. Pass tools through the API's tools parameter rather than in the system prompt, as the card asks
  4. The card recommends temperature 1.0, top_p 0.95, repetition_penalty 1.05 and max_tokens up to 32,768
  5. Send your own system prompt, or set identity_mode, since the template otherwise adds an Apodex identity block
  6. The template keeps all earlier reasoning in the context unless preserve_thinking is false, which grows long agent sessions
  7. Thinking is on by default, send chat_template_kwargs with enable_thinking false for short tasks, a switch the card doesn't mention
  8. The card's Python example has a broken line where it runs the tool (available_toolsname), so fix it to available_tools[name](**args) before running
  9. Validate JSON output yourself, since structured output isn't documented

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Agents-A1-4B or Apodex-1.1-mini?

Agents-A1-4B and Apodex-1.1-mini score within a point of each other on agent readiness, 61 (C) and 61 (C). Apodex-1.1-mini leads on risk and agent interface.

Other comparisons with Agents-A1-4B or Apodex-1.1-mini

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