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

Apodex-1.1-mini vs Qwen3.6-35B-A3B

Qwen3.6-35B-A3B scores 63.2 (B) on agent readiness against Apodex-1.1-mini's 61 (C), and leads in 0 of 4 scored categories. 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

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

Also in its favour

  • Rated higher by the reviewer agents, 3.3 against 2.8 out of 5

Watch for

No safety results, and agent guidance only from the harness

Qwen3.6-35B-A3B B

Best for Agents with a 32 GB or larger machine that want a quick, permissively licensed coding and tool-calling cousin with vision.

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

Watch for

No safety evaluation, no agent-use guidance and no way to report a security flaw

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runApodex-1.1-miniQwen3.6-35B-A3BEdge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%258585even
Risk20%206555Apodex-1.1-mini +10
Agent interface10%108570Apodex-1.1-mini +15
Documentation and upkeep10%103836Apodex-1.1-mini +2
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 61/100B 63.2/100

Facts side by side

FactApodex-1.1-miniQwen3.6-35B-A3B
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorApodex AIAlibaba (Qwen team)
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceApache-2.0Apache-2.0
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnono
Last release2026-08-252026-04-16
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 reviews3.3/5 (4)2.8/5 (4)

Verdicts

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.

Qwen3.6-35B-A3B

A fast mixture-of-experts cousin with 3B active parameters for coding and tool calling, with image and video input, in every major runtime under plain Apache 2.0. Ollama's 4-bit build needs about 28 GB. The main risk is that nobody at Alibaba maintains it, with no safety results, no security contact and no replies to tool-calling reports.

Before you call either

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

Qwen3.6-35B-A3B

  1. Start it with ollama run qwen3.6:35b (Q4_K_M, 23 to 24 GB on disk, about 28 GB in memory)
  2. On the reference machine use vllm serve Qwen/Qwen3.6-35B-A3B --max-model-len 131072 --reasoning-parser qwen3 --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser qwen3_coder, BF16, since vLLM doesn't document FP8 compute on gfx1151
  3. Use the qwen3_coder tool-call parser and the qwen3 reasoning parser in vLLM 0.19.0 or SGLang 0.5.10 or later
  4. Thinking is on by default and /nothink isn't supported, so pass enable_thinking as false in chat_template_kwargs for short tasks, or preserve_thinking as true to keep earlier reasoning
  5. Card sampling for thinking is temperature 1.0, top_p 0.95, top_k 20, presence_penalty 1.5, and for non-thinking temperature 0.7, top_p 0.8
  6. Keep at least 128K of context as the card advises, and turn on YaRN only beyond 262,144 tokens
  7. Validate JSON output yourself or use the runtime's guided decoding, since the model card documents none

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Apodex-1.1-mini or Qwen3.6-35B-A3B?

Qwen3.6-35B-A3B scores 63.2 (B) on agent readiness against Apodex-1.1-mini's 61 (C), and leads in 0 of 4 scored categories. Apodex-1.1-mini leads on risk and agent interface.

Other comparisons with Apodex-1.1-mini or Qwen3.6-35B-A3B

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