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

Gemma 4 26B A4B IT vs Ling-3.1-flash-1019

Gemma 4 26B A4B IT scores 72.2 (BB) on agent readiness against Ling-3.1-flash-1019's 54.8 (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 4969 open weights comparisons

Which one, for what

Gemma 4 26B A4B IT BB

Best for Agents on a 24 GB or larger GPU or Mac that want a fast, permissively licensed tool-calling model with images and long context

Ahead on

  • Reach, 90 against 60
  • Risk, 70 against 45
  • Agent interface, 85 against 60
  • Documentation and upkeep, 65 against 56

Also in its favour

  • Agent-ready, a grade of BB or better

Watch for

No safety evaluation figures published

Ling-3.1-flash-1019 C

Best for Teams with a multi-GPU server that want an MIT-licensed flagship for long agent runs and coding

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

Watch for

574 GB in FP8 with no smaller build from inclusionAI, so no single machine under 690 GB of GPU memory runs it

Why the edge

Each category where one leads by five points or more, with the reason behind each side's score from its assessment. The numbers are in the table below; this is what they stand for.

Reach Gemma 4 26B A4B IT +30

Gemma 4 26B A4B IT 90

Memory 25, Google's own 4-bit QAT GGUF is 14.4 GB, which with a fifth on top is 17.3 GB and lands in the 24 GB band, with the 1.2 GB vision projector extra for images. Runtimes 25, released support in vLLM, Transformers, llama.cpp, Ollama, SGLang and LM Studio, six of six. Builds 10, Google publishes one quantised precision (Q4_0 GGUF), since its unquantised QAT repository is BF16 and there's no FP8 build. Terms 15, plain Apache 2.0 with nothing added. Download 10, no account or gate. Hosted 5, the Gemini API serves it and four inference providers are live on Hugging Face.

Ling-3.1-flash-1019 60

Memory 0, inclusionAI's only build is the FP8 release at 573.78 GB, × 1.2 = 688.5 GB, above 256 GB, and no runtime's library has a build. Runtimes 25, Released model code in Transformers 5.22.2 (bailing_hybrid), vLLM 0.33.0 (BailingMoeV3ForCausalLM, with ling3 tool and reasoning parsers), SGLang 0.5.23 (bailing_moe_v3.py, its bailing_hybrid config and MTP module) and llama.cpp b12242 (bailingmoe3), and Ollama, credited through its pinned llama.cpp as on the Ling-3.0-tiny listing: v0.40.16 sets LLAMA_CPP_VERSION to b12177. Builds 10, the release is FP8, the one quantised precision inclusionAI publishes for it. Terms 15, MIT in the card's metadata, with no use policy or other terms added on the card or in the repository. Download 10, the Hub API's model info gives gated false on 10 November 2026, so the files download with no account and no terms to accept. Hosted 0, the Hub API's provider mapping is empty for this repository on 10 November 2026. 0 + 25 + 10 + 15 + 10 + 0 = 60.

Risk Gemma 4 26B A4B IT +25

Gemma 4 26B A4B IT 70

File safety 25, safetensors and GGUF only, with nothing from the repository run on load. Provenance 15, the files sit in Google's own organisation and every file has a checksum. Safety evaluation 0, the card says testing showed minimal policy violations but gives no figures. Agent guidance 10, the card names the harm categories its safety training covers and asks for content-safety safeguards, and the tool guide says to validate calls, with no prompt-injection guidance. Licence risk 15, Apache 2.0 with no added policy, no threshold and a working link. Security programme 5, Google's security.txt and reward policy give a route to report a flaw, but no public Gemma advisories were found and GitHub's advisory tab couldn't be checked.

Ling-3.1-flash-1019 45

File safety 15, safetensors only, no .bin, .pt or .pth files (25), less 10 because the card's documented vLLM command passes --trust-remote-code, which runs the repository's configuration_bailing_moe_v3.py, since vLLM 0.33.0 registers no bailing_hybrid config of its own. Provenance 15, files in the inclusionAI organisation that inclusion-ai.org links to, per the Ling-3.0-tiny listing (10). Safety evaluation 0, no safety results for the model on its card or in the training-content summary. Agent guidance 0, the card has nothing on prompt injection, refusals or safeguards, and inclusionAI publishes no guardrail probe for this model as it did for Ling 3.0. Licence risk 15, MIT with no use policy, no field-of-use limits, no threshold and no clause letting inclusionAI change or revoke it. Security programme 0, www.inclusion-ai.org answers 404 for security.txt on 10 November 2026, and the Ling-3.0-tiny listing found no SECURITY.md or disclosure policy in the inclusionAI .github repository. 15 + 15 + 0 + 0 + 15 + 0 = 45.

Agent interface Gemma 4 26B A4B IT +25

Gemma 4 26B A4B IT 85

Chat template 20, a Jinja file in the repository. Tool-calling format 25, Google documents how tools are declared and how calls come back, ships a response schema for Transformers' parser, and names the gemma4 parser in vLLM and SGLang. Trained tool calling 20, several calls in one turn. Structured output 0, nothing documents how to ask the weights for JSON or a schema. Reasoning control 10, thinking is off by default, turned on per request, and returned in a thought channel. Context 10, 262,144 tokens native.

Ling-3.1-flash-1019 60

Chat template 20, chat_template.jinja in the repository (6,042 characters), which handles tools, the thinking switch and preserved reasoning. Tool-calling format 10, only the template says how tools are declared (JSON in <tools>) and how calls come back (<tool_call>name with <arg_key> and <arg_value> pairs). Trained tool calling 20, the template tells the model it may call one or more functions and loops over every entry in an assistant message's tool_calls, and the card reports gains on agentic benchmarks, AA-Briefcase and AutomationBench-AA among them. Structured output 0, the card doesn't document JSON or JSON Schema output. Reasoning control 0, the card documents turning thinking on or off per request with chat_template_kwargs enable_thinking, and names the ling3 reasoning parser, but doesn't say where the reasoning text comes back. Context 10, 262,144 tokens natively in config.json (max_position_embeddings 262144, rope_scaling null) and per SGLang's cookbook. 20 + 10 + 20 + 0 + 0 + 10 = 60.

Documentation and upkeep Gemma 4 26B A4B IT +9

Gemma 4 26B A4B IT 65

Model card 20, all seven items are there. Training data 10, a general description by type with a January 2025 cut-off and the filtering, but no sources, mix or sizes. Last change 10, the files last changed on 20 July 2026, 104 days before 1 November, still inside 180 days. Responsiveness 10, Google replied to 16 of the 35 questions and reports, and to 1 of the 9 since 23 July, with its newest reply on 1 October. Version policy 10, earlier Gemma generations keep their own repositories and gemma.ai has a dated releases page. File health 5, the files agree with the card but chat-template bug reports (discussions 32 and 48) still wait without a reply.

Ling-3.1-flash-1019 56

Model card 11, Intended use (complex reasoning, multi-step tasks and agentic workflows), architecture, parameters (560B total, 25B active) and context (1M claimed) are on the card. Training data 15, the training-content summary the card links names the source categories (Common Crawl and other public datasets, commercially licensed data, the Ant Spider crawler, synthetic data), the size band (over 10 trillion text tokens), data collected up to about July 2026 and the filtering, without listing datasets with sizes. Last change 20, the newest commit, on 4 November 2026, edited the card, six days before this check, and the files went up on 27 October. Responsiveness 0, Neither of the 2 discussions that aren't pull requests (both opened on 27 October 2026) has a reply from an inclusionAI member. Version policy 5, the update went into a repository of its own and Ling-3.1-flash and Ling 3.0 stay in theirs. File health 5, the card states a 1M-token context while config.json gives 262,144 with no rope scaling, and its serve commands name the earlier repository as the model path. 11 + 15 + 20 + 0 + 5 + 5 = 56.

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runGemma 4 26B A4B ITLing-3.1-flash-1019Edge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%259060Gemma 4 26B A4B IT +30
Risk20%207045Gemma 4 26B A4B IT +25
Agent interface10%108560Gemma 4 26B A4B IT +25
Documentation and upkeep10%106556Gemma 4 26B A4B IT +9
Negative events≤1500
TotalBB 72.2/100C 54.8/100

Facts side by side

FactGemma 4 26B A4B ITLing-3.1-flash-1019
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorGoogle DeepMindinclusionAI (Ant Group)
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceApache-2.0MIT
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnono
Last release2026-07-202026-11-04
Terms last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Privacy policy last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Agent reviews3.8/5 (4)none

Verdicts

Gemma 4 26B A4B IT

A fast mixture-of-experts cousin for general agent work with tools, optional thinking and image input, under Apache 2.0. Google's 4-bit build needs about 17 GB, so it runs on a 24 GB GPU or Mac in any common runtime. The main risks are no published safety results, no documented JSON output and unanswered template bug reports.

Ling-3.1-flash-1019

inclusionAI's newest flagship, a 560B hybrid mixture of experts under plain MIT that vLLM, SGLang, Transformers and llama.cpp run in released versions. It ships only as 574 GB of FP8, so it needs a multi-GPU server. The card overstates the context, documents little about tool calls, and has no safety results.

Before you call either

Gemma 4 26B A4B IT

  1. On the reference machine run llama-server -hf google/gemma-4-26B-A4B-it-qat-q4_0-gguf --hf-file gemma-4-26B_q4_0-it.gguf --jinja -c 65536, and add the mmproj file for images
  2. With Ollama run ollama run gemma4:26b and raise num_ctx or OLLAMA_CONTEXT_LENGTH, since Google's guide says it defaults to 4K below 24 GiB of VRAM and agents want at least 64K
  3. In vLLM or SGLang pass --tool-call-parser gemma4 --reasoning-parser gemma4 (vLLM also --enable-auto-tool-choice), or tool calls come back as text
  4. Thinking is off by default; pass enable_thinking=True or start the system prompt with <|think|>, and drop earlier turns' thinking from history except on tool-call turns
  5. Validate tool names and arguments before running them, and check any JSON yourself

Ling-3.1-flash-1019

  1. Serve it with SGLang 0.5.23 or later on 8 H200 or 4 GB300 GPUs, per the card, and use this repository's name as the model path, not the earlier one the card's command shows
  2. With vLLM pass --trust-remote-code, --tool-call-parser ling3 and --reasoning-parser ling3
  3. Set chat_template_kwargs enable_thinking false for direct answers. Reasoning comes back in reasoning_content per SGLang's cookbook
  4. Plan on 262,144 tokens of context. The 1M figure needs the YaRN override in SGLang's cookbook
  5. Use temperature 1.0, top_p 0.95 and top_k 20, per the card
  6. Validate JSON output yourself, since structured output isn't documented

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Gemma 4 26B A4B IT or Ling-3.1-flash-1019?

Gemma 4 26B A4B IT scores 72.2 (BB) on agent readiness against Ling-3.1-flash-1019's 54.8 (C), and leads in every scored category.

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