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

MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B vs Mistral Large 4

MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B scores 61 (C) on agent readiness against Mistral Large 4's 54.6 (C), and leads in 1 of 4 scored categories. Mistral Large 4 leads on risk, agent interface 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 3588 open weights comparisons

Which one, for what

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.

Ahead on

  • Reach, 70 against 50

Watch for

Only BF16 from Xiaomi, about 23 GB to run

Mistral Large 4 C

Best for Operators with an 8-GPU Blackwell or H200 node who want a frontier-sized open model for coding agents and defensive security, with a hosted twin on Mistral's API.

Ahead on

  • Risk, 75 against 60
  • Agent interface, 95 against 70
  • Documentation and upkeep, 64 against 40

Watch for

The smallest 4-bit build needs about 732 GB, so nothing fits a single workstation or a 128 GB machine

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runMiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9BMistral Large 4Edge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%257050MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B +20
Risk20%206075Mistral Large 4 +15
Agent interface10%107095Mistral Large 4 +25
Documentation and upkeep10%104064Mistral Large 4 +24
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 61/100C 54.6/100

Facts side by side

FactMiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9BMistral Large 4
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorXiaomi (MiMo team)Mistral AI
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceMIT (metadata only, no LICENSE file); built on Qwen3.5-9B under Apache 2.0Mistral Ecosystem Open-Weight License (modified MIT)
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnono
Last release2026-09-212026-10-29
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 reviews2.3/5 (4)none

Verdicts

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.

Mistral Large 4

A frontier-sized open cousin for coding agents and defensive security, with strict JSON Schema output, parallel tool calls and three reasoning efforts. It needs a multi-GPU server, about 732 GB for the smallest 4-bit build, and vLLM and SGLang run it only from special images. The main risk is a licence that bars Model-as-a-Service businesses without a separate deal.

Before you call either

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

Mistral Large 4

  1. Serve the NVFP4 build on Blackwell with vllm/vllm-openai:mistral-large-4 --model mistralai/Mistral-Large-4-1T-A52B-NVFP4 --tensor-parallel-size 8 --kv-cache-dtype fp8_ds_mla --tool-call-parser mistral --reasoning-parser mistral --enable-auto-tool-choice; released vLLM doesn't load it
  2. On H200 use the FP8 build with tensor parallelism of 16 or 8 by 2 pipelines, per vLLM's recipe
  3. Pass reasoning_effort low, medium or high (default high); any other value makes the template raise an error, and there is no off switch
  4. Read the reasoning from message.reasoning; max_completion_tokens counts reasoning tokens too
  5. Use temperature 1.0 and top_p 0.95 at every effort, per the card
  6. Ask for JSON with response_format type json_schema and strict true; the template passes the schema to the model
  7. The template rejects a tool message straight after a user message and a conversation that doesn't start with a user or system message
  8. Add --speculative-config '{"method": "dspark", "num_speculative_tokens": 3}' to use the embedded draft head
  9. If you'll offer it to others as a hosted model, read the licence first; Model-as-a-Service use needs Mistral's commercial licence

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B or Mistral Large 4?

MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B scores 61 (C) on agent readiness against Mistral Large 4's 54.6 (C), and leads in 1 of 4 scored categories. Mistral Large 4 leads on risk, agent interface and documentation and upkeep.

Other comparisons with MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B or Mistral Large 4

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