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

Agents-A1-4B vs Laguna M.1

Agents-A1-4B scores 61 (C) on agent readiness against Laguna M.1's 55.5 (C), and leads in 2 of 4 scored categories. Laguna M.1 leads on 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 65
  • Documentation and upkeep, 43 against 36

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

Laguna M.1 C

Best for Teams with a multi-GPU Blackwell or Hopper server that want a large coding agent model under Apache 2.0.

Ahead on

  • Agent interface, 85 against 70

Watch for

The smallest build needs about 167 GB, more than a 128 GB machine

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runAgents-A1-4BLaguna M.1Edge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%259065Agents-A1-4B +25
Risk20%205555even
Agent interface10%107085Laguna M.1 +15
Documentation and upkeep10%104336Agents-A1-4B +7
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 61/100C 55.5/100

Facts side by side

FactAgents-A1-4BLaguna M.1
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorInternScience (Shanghai AI Laboratory)Poolside
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceApache-2.0Apache-2.0
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnono
Last release2026-07-142026-07-14
Terms last updatedno document linked
Privacy policy last updatedno 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)2.5/5 (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.

Laguna M.1

A large coding and agent cousin under plain Apache 2.0, for agents with a multi-GPU server. Its smallest build needs about 167 GB, more than a 128 GB machine, and no local runtime library packages it. The main risks are no upkeep since July, no hosted fallback shown today, no safety results, and repository code on the SGLang route.

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

Laguna M.1

  1. Run the NVFP4 build on Blackwell GPUs with vllm serve poolside/Laguna-M.1-NVFP4 --tensor-parallel-size 2 --tool-call-parser poolside_v1 --reasoning-parser poolside_v1 --enable-auto-tool-choice, on vLLM 0.21.0 or later
  2. Thinking is off in the template unless you pass enable_thinking true or start the server with --default-chat-template-kwargs '{"enable_thinking": true}', which Poolside recommends for agentic coding
  3. Pass earlier reasoning back as reasoning_content in the history, since the card says reasoning may stop in later steps if it's dropped
  4. Sampling per the card is temperature 1.0 and top_k 20
  5. The FP8 build's Docker image and serve.sh predate upstream support and set a 4,096-token context, so prefer a released vLLM
  6. It doesn't fit our 128 GB reference machine at any published precision
  7. Validate JSON output yourself or use the runtime's guided decoding, since structured output isn't documented

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Agents-A1-4B or Laguna M.1?

Agents-A1-4B scores 61 (C) on agent readiness against Laguna M.1's 55.5 (C), and leads in 2 of 4 scored categories. Laguna M.1 leads on agent interface.

Other comparisons with Agents-A1-4B or Laguna M.1

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