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

MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B vs Qwen3.8-27B

Qwen3.8-27B scores 68.6 (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

Qwen3.8-27B B

Best for Agents that want a capable open model with vision on one 24 to 32 GB GPU or Mac, with the widest runtime support and a plain licence.

Ahead on

  • Reach, 90 against 70

Also in its favour

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

Watch for

No safety results, prompt-injection guidance or security contact

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runMiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9BQwen3.8-27BEdge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%257090Qwen3.8-27B +20
Risk20%206055MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B +5
Agent interface10%107070even
Documentation and upkeep10%104036MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B +4
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 61/100B 68.6/100

Facts side by side

FactMiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9BQwen3.8-27B
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 release2026-09-212026-08-14
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.

Qwen3.8-27B

A dense cousin for coding and agent work with image and video input that runs almost anywhere. Ollama's 4-bit build needs about 22 GB, and five providers host it for agents without the hardware. The main risk is that nobody at Alibaba answers, there are no safety results or agent guidance, and the tool format is only in the template.

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

Qwen3.8-27B

  1. Quickest start is ollama run qwen3.8, about 18 GB of files
  2. On our reference machine use BF16 with vllm serve Qwen/Qwen3.8-27B --max-model-len 131072 --reasoning-parser qwen3 --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser qwen3_coder, since FP8 on gfx1151 isn't documented
  3. Use the qwen3_coder tool parser, SGLang's cookbook says the Hermes parser leaves its calls unparsed
  4. Thinking is on by default, pass chat_template_kwargs with enable_thinking false for short tasks, and read the reasoning from reasoning_content
  5. reasoning_effort takes xhigh (default), medium or low, and any other value makes the template raise an error
  6. Sampling per the card is temperature 1.0 and top_p 0.95 when thinking, temperature 0.7, top_p 0.8 and presence_penalty 1.5 without
  7. Preserved thinking keeps earlier reasoning in the context unless preserve_thinking is false, which grows long agent sessions
  8. Turn on YaRN only beyond 262,144 tokens, the card warns static YaRN can cost quality on short texts
  9. Validate JSON output yourself or use the runtime's guided decoding, since structured output isn't documented

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B or Qwen3.8-27B?

Qwen3.8-27B scores 68.6 (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 Qwen3.8-27B

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