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

Darwin-36B-Opus vs GLM-4.7-Flash

GLM-4.7-Flash scores 63 (B) on agent readiness against Darwin-36B-Opus's 61 (C), and leads in 1 of 4 scored categories. 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

Darwin-36B-Opus C

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 28

Watch for

The merge method is proprietary and the current weights include an undescribed targeted refinement

GLM-4.7-Flash B

Best for Agents and developers who want a small, permissively licensed tool-calling model on one 24 to 32 GB GPU or Mac, in almost any runtime

Ahead on

  • Agent interface, 85 against 70

Watch for

No change to the files since 29 January 2026 and no zai-org reply on discussions since 31 January

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runDarwin-36B-OpusGLM-4.7-FlashEdge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%258080even
Risk20%205555even
Agent interface10%107085GLM-4.7-Flash +15
Documentation and upkeep10%105128Darwin-36B-Opus +23
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 61/100B 63/100

Facts side by side

FactDarwin-36B-OpusGLM-4.7-Flash
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorFINAL-Bench (VIDRAFT)Z.ai (Zhipu AI)
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceApache-2.0MIT
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnono
Last release2026-04-232026-01-29
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 reviews2.5/5 (4)2.8/5 (4)

Verdicts

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.

GLM-4.7-Flash

A small MIT-licensed mixture-of-experts model with about 3B active parameters, for local agent and coding work with several tool calls per turn and optional thinking. It runs in Ollama at about 23 GB and in nearly every common runtime. The main risk is neglect, with no changes or replies since early February and no safety results.

Before you call either

Darwin-36B-Opus

  1. Quickest start is llama-server -hf FINAL-Bench/POCKET-35B-GGUF:Q4_K_M --jinja, about 21 GB of files
  2. 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
  3. Thinking is on by default, send chat_template_kwargs with enable_thinking false for short tasks, a switch the card doesn't mention
  4. The card suggests temperature 0.6 to 0.7 and at least 5,120 new tokens for its think traces
  5. 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
  6. Text only, the vision encoder of Qwen3.6-35B-A3B isn't in these files
  7. Validate JSON output yourself, since structured output isn't documented

GLM-4.7-Flash

  1. On our reference machine start it with vllm serve zai-org/GLM-4.7-Flash --max-model-len 65536 --tool-call-parser glm47 --reasoning-parser glm45 --enable-auto-tool-choice --served-model-name glm-4.7-flash
  2. Or run ollama run glm-4.7-flash for the 19 GB q4_K_M build
  3. Without the glm47 and glm45 parsers, tool calls and reasoning come back as plain text
  4. Use a released vLLM (0.32.0 or later) or SGLang (0.5.22 or later); the card's nightly and pull-request builds date from January 2026
  5. Pass chat_template_kwargs: {"enable_thinking": false} for short tasks, since thinking is on by default
  6. Set clear_thinking: false to keep earlier reasoning in multi-turn agent work, as Z.ai does for τ²-Bench and Terminal Bench
  7. Set the context length yourself, since config.json allows 202,752 tokens and tokenizer_config.json says 128,000

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Darwin-36B-Opus or GLM-4.7-Flash?

GLM-4.7-Flash scores 63 (B) on agent readiness against Darwin-36B-Opus's 61 (C), and leads in 1 of 4 scored categories. Darwin-36B-Opus leads on documentation and upkeep.

Other comparisons with Darwin-36B-Opus or GLM-4.7-Flash

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