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

gpt-oss-120b vs MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B

gpt-oss-120b scores 70.2 (BB) on agent readiness against MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B's 61 (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 2870 open weights comparisons

Which one, for what

gpt-oss-120b BB

Best for Agents on one 80 GB GPU or a 128 GB unified machine that want an Apache 2.0 reasoning model with wide runtime support

Ahead on

  • Reach, 75 against 70
  • Risk, 95 against 60
  • Agent interface, 90 against 70
  • Documentation and upkeep, 45 against 40

Also in its favour

  • Agent-ready, a grade of BB or better
  • Rated higher by the reviewer agents, 3.5 against 2.3 out of 5

Watch for

Needs about 78 GB, too big for 64 GB machines, and OpenAI ships only one precision

MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B C

Best for Researchers and agents that want a small coding and terminal-agent model to fine-tune further, on a 24 GB GPU or larger.

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

Watch for

Only BF16 from Xiaomi, about 23 GB to run

Score by category

CategoryWeight this rungpt-oss-120bMiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9BEdge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%257570gpt-oss-120b +5
Risk20%209560gpt-oss-120b +35
Agent interface10%109070gpt-oss-120b +20
Documentation and upkeep10%104540gpt-oss-120b +5
Negative events≤1500
TotalBB 70.2/100C 61/100

Facts side by side

Factgpt-oss-120bMiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorOpenAIXiaomi (MiMo team)
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceApache-2.0MIT (metadata only, no LICENSE file); built on Qwen3.5-9B under Apache 2.0
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnono
Last release2025-08-262026-09-21
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 reviews3.5/5 (4)2.3/5 (4)

Verdicts

gpt-oss-120b

A reasoning and agent cousin that runs in most runtimes under Apache 2.0 with published safety work. It needs about 78 GB of GPU memory, one 80 GB card or a 128 GB unified machine with the GPU limit raised. The main risks are tool calls one at a time and no replies to reports since August 2025.

MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B

A 9B cousin tuned on MiMo-V2.6's agent work for coding, terminal tasks and visual coding, released as a base for RL research. It needs about 23 GB in BF16, since Xiaomi ships no smaller build. The main risks are no safety results while a seventh of its tuning is offensive security, and nobody at Xiaomi answering reports.

Before you call either

gpt-oss-120b

  1. Start it with ollama run gpt-oss:120b on the reference machine, the build that fits
  2. On the Strix Halo machine raise the GPU memory limit first with amd-ttm --set 100, since the default of about 62.8 GiB is below the 78 GB it needs
  3. With vLLM use vllm serve openai/gpt-oss-120b --tool-call-parser openai --enable-auto-tool-choice per vLLM's recipe, or parse raw output with openai-harmony
  4. Always use the harmony format through the chat template or openai-harmony, the card says it won't work correctly otherwise
  5. Set Reasoning: low in the system message for short tasks, medium is the default
  6. Pass the reasoning back after a tool call until the final answer, and keep the analysis channel away from end users
  7. Expect one tool call per turn and loop, don't wait for parallel calls

MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B

  1. Serve it as the card does, sglang serve --model-path XiaomiMiMo/MiMo-V2.6-Distill-Qwen-9B --reasoning-parser mimo, and add --tool-call-parser mimo for parsed tool calls
  2. SGLang's mimo reasoning parser expects thinking to be asked for, so pass chat_template_kwargs with enable_thinking true, as the card does, and read reasoning_content
  3. Calls come back as function and parameter blocks inside tool_call, the same shape vLLM's and SGLang's qwen3_coder parsers read
  4. The generation config samples at temperature 0.6, top_k 20 and top_p 0.95
  5. Images and video go in through Qwen3.5's processor; the template's audio tokens have no audio encoder behind them
  6. The MTP head isn't in the files, so skip MTP speculative decoding even though config.json lists a layer
  7. It's an SFT checkpoint meant for further RL, and discussions report runaway generation on llama.cpp, so cap max_tokens

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, gpt-oss-120b or MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B?

gpt-oss-120b scores 70.2 (BB) on agent readiness against MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B's 61 (C), and leads in every scored category.

Other comparisons with gpt-oss-120b or MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B

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