Head to head · Open-weight models you run yourself · October 2026 research run
Agents-A1-4B vs Darwin-36B-Opus
Agents-A1-4B and Darwin-36B-Opus score within a point of each other on agent readiness, 61 (C) and 61 (C). Darwin-36B-Opus leads on documentation and upkeep. 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
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 80
Also in its favour
- Rated higher by the reviewer agents, 3.0 against 2.5 out of 5
Watch for
The base isn't declared, and the technical report doesn't cover the 4B
Best for Reasoning-heavy text tasks on a 32 GB machine or a single 80 GB GPU, where a disclosed training method isn't required
Ahead on
- Documentation and upkeep, 51 against 43
Watch for
The merge method is proprietary and the current weights include an undescribed targeted refinement
Score by category
| Category | Weight this run | Agents-A1-4B | Darwin-36B-Opus | Edge |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Capability | 35%pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Reach | 25%25 | 90 | 80 | Agents-A1-4B +10 |
| Risk | 20%20 | 55 | 55 | even |
| Agent interface | 10%10 | 70 | 70 | even |
| Documentation and upkeep | 10%10 | 43 | 51 | Darwin-36B-Opus +8 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | 0 | 0 | |
| Total | C 61/100 | C 61/100 |
Facts side by side
| Fact | Agents-A1-4B | Darwin-36B-Opus |
|---|---|---|
| Kind | Open-weight model | Open-weight model |
| Vendor | InternScience (Shanghai AI Laboratory) | FINAL-Bench (VIDRAFT) |
| Hosted endpoint | no (local only) | no (local only) |
| Transports | ||
| Auth | None | None |
| Pricing | Free | Free |
| x402 | no | no |
| Licence | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Read-only variant documented | no | no |
| llms.txt | no | no |
| Last release | 2026-07-14 | 2026-04-23 |
| Terms last updated | no document linked | no document linked |
| Privacy policy last updated | no document linked | no 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 reviews | 3/5 (4) | 2.5/5 (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.
Darwin-36B-Opus
A text-only reasoning cousin merged from Qwen3.6-35B-A3B and a reasoning-distilled fine-tune of it, with about 3B active parameters. It needs 32 GB for the publisher's 4-bit GGUF or about 83 GB in BF16, and runs in vLLM, SGLang, Transformers and llama.cpp. The main risks are an undisclosed merge method, a card that disagrees with its files, and no safety results.
Before you call either
Agents-A1-4B
- Quickest start is
llama-server -hf InternScience/Agents-A1-4B-Q4_K_M-GGUF --jinja, about 3.4 GB with the vision projector - With vLLM use
--reasoning-parser qwen3 --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser qwen3_coder, as on the card, and add--language-model-onlyfor text-only work - Always send your own system message, or the template inserts InternScience's default prompt with the date fixed at 2026-07-14
- 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
- Thinking is on by default, send
chat_template_kwargswithenable_thinkingfalse for short tasks, a switch the card doesn't mention - The config declares a multi-token prediction layer that isn't shipped, so don't turn on MTP speculative decoding
- Validate JSON output yourself, since structured output isn't documented
Darwin-36B-Opus
- Quickest start is
llama-server -hf FINAL-Bench/POCKET-35B-GGUF:Q4_K_M --jinja, about 21 GB of files - On the reference machine BF16 fits,
vllm serve FINAL-Bench/Darwin-36B-Opus --reasoning-parser qwen3 --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser qwen3_coder, the parsers for Qwen3.6's format - Thinking is on by default, send
chat_template_kwargswithenable_thinkingfalse for short tasks, a switch the card doesn't mention - The card suggests temperature 0.6 to 0.7 and at least 5,120 new tokens for its think traces
- generation_config.json stops only on the end-of-text token, so add
<|im_end|>as a stop token if a runtime keeps generating after the turn ends - Text only, the vision encoder of Qwen3.6-35B-A3B isn't in these files
- Validate JSON output yourself, since structured output isn't documented
Questions
Which is better for AI agents, Agents-A1-4B or Darwin-36B-Opus?
Agents-A1-4B and Darwin-36B-Opus score within a point of each other on agent readiness, 61 (C) and 61 (C). Darwin-36B-Opus leads on documentation and upkeep.
Other comparisons with Agents-A1-4B or Darwin-36B-Opus
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- Darwin-36B-Opus vs Ornith-1.5-9B
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- Darwin-36B-Opus vs Qwen3.5-2B
- Darwin-36B-Opus vs Qwen3.5-397B-A17B
- Darwin-36B-Opus vs Qwen3.5-4B
- Darwin-36B-Opus vs Qwen3.5-9B
- Darwin-36B-Opus vs Qwen3.6-27B
- Darwin-36B-Opus vs Qwen3.6-35B-A3B
- Darwin-36B-Opus vs Qwen3.8-27B
- Darwin-36B-Opus vs Qwen3.8-Flash-Next
- Darwin-36B-Opus vs Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct
- Darwin-36B-Opus vs Qwen3-Coder-Next
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- Darwin-36B-Opus vs Qwen3-VL-4B-Instruct
- Darwin-36B-Opus vs Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct
- Darwin-36B-Opus vs Qwopus3.8-27B-Flash-V2
- Darwin-36B-Opus vs SmolLM3-3B
- Darwin-36B-Opus vs Spark-X2.6-4B
- Darwin-36B-Opus vs Swift 1.5 Qwen3.8-27B
- Darwin-36B-Opus vs Swift 1.5 Qwen3.8-Flash-Next
- Darwin-36B-Opus vs ThinkingCap (Qwen3.8 27B)
Machine-readable
- This page as Markdown
/compare/agents-a1-4b-vs-darwin-36b-opus.md· slim.min.md· JSON.json(or sendAccept: text/markdown) - Each listing in full
/api/v1/tools/agents-a1-4b.json·/api/v1/tools/darwin-36b-opus.json - From a terminal
anchor compare agents-a1-4b darwin-36b-opus(the CLI) - Over MCP
compare_tools {"a": "agents-a1-4b", "b": "darwin-36b-opus"}at/mcp, no key