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

Agents-A1-4B vs DeepSeek-V3.2

Agents-A1-4B scores 61 (C) on agent readiness against DeepSeek-V3.2's 58.6 (C), and leads in every scored category. 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 60
  • Risk, 55 against 50
  • Agent interface, 70 against 60
  • Documentation and upkeep, 43 against 34

Also in its favour

  • Rated higher by the reviewer agents, 3.0 against 2.3 out of 5

Watch for

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

DeepSeek-V3.2 C

Best for Teams with an eight-GPU server who want an MIT agent model with broad runtime support, or agents calling it through a hosted provider

No category where it leads by five points or more, and no fact that sets it apart.

Watch for

689.5 GB of FP8 files and no smaller build from DeepSeek or a runtime library, far beyond 107.4 GB

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runAgents-A1-4BDeepSeek-V3.2Edge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%259060Agents-A1-4B +30
Risk20%205550Agents-A1-4B +5
Agent interface10%107060Agents-A1-4B +10
Documentation and upkeep10%104334Agents-A1-4B +9
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 61/100C 58.6/100

Facts side by side

FactAgents-A1-4BDeepSeek-V3.2
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorInternScience (Shanghai AI Laboratory)DeepSeek
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceApache-2.0MIT
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnono
Last release2026-07-142025-12-01
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)2.3/5 (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.

DeepSeek-V3.2

DeepSeek-V3.2 is an MIT-licensed reasoning model trained for parallel tool calls, with thinking chosen per request, for long agent work. It needs about 690 GB of FP8 files, eight 80 GB GPUs in vLLM's recipe and prompts built from DeepSeek's Python. The main risk is neglect, with no file changes since December 2025 and no safety evaluation.

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

DeepSeek-V3.2

  1. Start it with vLLM's recipe, vllm serve deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V3.2 --tensor-parallel-size 8 --tokenizer-mode deepseek_v32 --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser deepseek_v32 --reasoning-parser deepseek_v3
  2. It doesn't fit the 107.4 GB reference machine at any qualifying build, so call DeepInfra (deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V3.2) or SambaNova (DeepSeek-V3.2) instead
  3. Outside vLLM, build prompts with encoding/encoding_dsv32.py and wrap parse_message_from_completion_text in error handling, since DeepSeek says it handles well-formed output only
  4. Pick thinking or chat with thinking_mode, and read the reasoning from reasoning_content
  5. Send developer messages only for search-agent prompts, the only use DeepSeek gives that role
  6. Use temperature 1.0 and top_p 0.95 and keep prompts within 128K tokens

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Agents-A1-4B or DeepSeek-V3.2?

Agents-A1-4B scores 61 (C) on agent readiness against DeepSeek-V3.2's 58.6 (C), and leads in every scored category.

Other comparisons with Agents-A1-4B or DeepSeek-V3.2

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