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

MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B vs Qwen3.5-122B-A10B

Qwen3.5-122B-A10B scores 63.6 (B) on agent readiness against MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B's 61 (C), and leads in 1 of 4 scored categories. MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B leads on risk. 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

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

  • Risk, 60 against 55

Watch for

Only BF16 from Xiaomi, about 23 GB to run

Qwen3.5-122B-A10B B

Best for Agents with a 128 GB unified-memory machine or two large GPUs that want a capable vision-language model with a plain licence.

Ahead on

  • Reach, 80 against 70

Also in its favour

  • Rated higher by the reviewer agents, 3.0 against 2.3 out of 5

Watch for

Too big for a single 64 GB machine even at 4 bits

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runMiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9BQwen3.5-122B-A10BEdge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%257080Qwen3.5-122B-A10B +10
Risk20%206055MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B +5
Agent interface10%107070even
Documentation and upkeep10%104039MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B +1
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 61/100B 63.6/100

Facts side by side

FactMiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9BQwen3.5-122B-A10B
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorXiaomi (MiMo team)Alibaba (Qwen team)
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceMIT (metadata only, no LICENSE file); built on Qwen3.5-9B under Apache 2.0Apache-2.0
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnono
Last release2026-09-212026-02-24
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)3/5 (4)

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.

Qwen3.5-122B-A10B

A strong mid-size cousin for coding, agent steps and reading images or video, with thinking you can switch off per request. Alibaba's 4-bit build needs about 95 GB, which fits one 128 GB unified-memory machine, and several providers host it. The main risk is silence, with no safety results, agent guidance or answers from Alibaba.

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

Qwen3.5-122B-A10B

  1. Quickest start on a 128 GB machine is ollama run qwen3.5:122b (Q4_K_M, 81 GB of files, about 97 GB with context)
  2. Alibaba's 4-bit build serves with vllm serve Qwen/Qwen3.5-122B-A10B-GPTQ-Int4 --max-model-len 262144 --reasoning-parser qwen3 --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser qwen3_coder --quantization moe_wna16, though that kernel isn't documented for AMD gfx1151
  3. Use the qwen3_coder tool parser and the qwen3 reasoning parser, as the card's commands do
  4. Turn thinking off with "chat_template_kwargs": {"enable_thinking": false} in the request body, since it's on by default and /think and /nothink aren't supported
  5. Sampling per the card is temperature 0.6, top_p 0.95 and top_k 20 when thinking, and temperature 0.7, top_p 0.8, top_k 20 and presence_penalty 1.5 without
  6. Keep the context at 128K or more if you rely on thinking, and turn on YaRN only past 262,144 tokens
  7. Add --language-model-only in vLLM to skip the vision encoder and free memory for the KV cache when you only need text
  8. Validate any JSON it returns, since structured output isn't documented

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B or Qwen3.5-122B-A10B?

Qwen3.5-122B-A10B scores 63.6 (B) on agent readiness against MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B's 61 (C), and leads in 1 of 4 scored categories. MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B leads on risk.

Other comparisons with MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B or Qwen3.5-122B-A10B

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