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

DiffusionGemma 26B A4B IT vs Qwen3.6-35B-A3B

Qwen3.6-35B-A3B scores 63.2 (B) on agent readiness against DiffusionGemma 26B A4B IT's 50 (D), and leads in 2 of 5 scored categories. DiffusionGemma 26B A4B IT leads on risk and 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

DiffusionGemma 26B A4B IT D

Best for Agents with about 64 GB of GPU memory that want fast single-user generation from text and images and can accept lower quality than Gemma 4

Ahead on

  • Risk, 70 against 55
  • Documentation and upkeep, 60 against 36

Watch for

No quantised build from Google, so the smallest official build needs the 64 GB band

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.

Ahead on

  • Capability, 58 against 30
  • Reach, 85 against 50

Watch for

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

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runDiffusionGemma 26B A4B ITQwen3.6-35B-A3BEdge
Capability35%353058Qwen3.6-35B-A3B +28
Reach25%255085Qwen3.6-35B-A3B +35
Risk20%207055DiffusionGemma 26B A4B IT +15
Agent interface10%107070even
Documentation and upkeep10%106036DiffusionGemma 26B A4B IT +24
Negative events≤1500
TotalD 50/100B 63.2/100

Facts side by side

FactDiffusionGemma 26B A4B ITQwen3.6-35B-A3B
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorGoogle DeepMindAlibaba (Qwen team)
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceApache-2.0Apache-2.0
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtyesno
Last release2026-07-152026-04-16
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 reviews2.5/5 (4)2.8/5 (4)

Verdicts

DiffusionGemma 26B A4B IT

A fast local generation cousin for low-concurrency work on text, images and video, with optional thinking and Gemma 4's tool format, under Apache 2.0. It needs about 62 GB for Google's BF16 files and runs only in Transformers or SGLang. The main risk is quality, since Google's own figures put it below Gemma 4 26B A4B, and it's labelled experimental.

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

DiffusionGemma 26B A4B IT

  1. Serve it with sglang serve --model-path google/diffusiongemma-26B-A4B-it --dllm-algorithm Gemma4Renoise --trust-remote-code on SGLang v0.5.22 or later, then call /v1/chat/completions
  2. In Transformers, install transformers>=5.11.0 and load DiffusionGemmaForBlockDiffusion with dtype="auto"; generation_config.json already holds the recommended sampler
  3. Turn thinking on with enable_thinking=True in apply_chat_template or <|think|> at the start of the system prompt, read the reasoning between <|channel>thought and <channel|>, and drop it from history before the next turn
  4. Don't rely on temperature, top_p, logit_bias or JSON Schema in SGLang, which ignores or rejects them for this model; validate JSON yourself
  5. Streaming arrives one 256-token canvas at a time, not token by token
  6. Put images before text in the prompt, and pick an image token budget of 70 to 1,120 by how much detail the task needs

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, DiffusionGemma 26B A4B IT or Qwen3.6-35B-A3B?

Qwen3.6-35B-A3B scores 63.2 (B) on agent readiness against DiffusionGemma 26B A4B IT's 50 (D), and leads in 2 of 5 scored categories. DiffusionGemma 26B A4B IT leads on risk and documentation and upkeep.

Other comparisons with DiffusionGemma 26B A4B IT or Qwen3.6-35B-A3B

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