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

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

Qwen3.8-Flash-Next and MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B score within a point of each other on agent readiness, 61.8 (C) and 61 (C). MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B leads on reach and 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

  • Reach, 70 against 65
  • Risk, 60 against 45

Watch for

Only BF16 from Xiaomi, about 23 GB to run

Qwen3.8-Flash-Next C

Best for Teams with a multi-GPU server or a 128 GB Mac who want Qwen's newest sparse architecture for agentic coding and multimodal work, and aren't a hosted-model or coding-assistant business.

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

Watch for

No build fits the reference machine's 107.4 GB, and Ollama's smallest Linux build is 120 GB

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runMiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9BQwen3.8-Flash-NextEdge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%257065MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B +5
Risk20%206045MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B +15
Agent interface10%107070even
Documentation and upkeep10%104036MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B +4
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 61/100C 61.8/100

Facts side by side

FactMiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9BQwen3.8-Flash-Next
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 2.0Qwen Community License 1.0 (custom, not an OSI licence). Free of charge, the model name shown in products above 100M monthly users or US$20M monthly revenue, and a separate licence from Qwen before commercial use by a Model as a Service or AI Work Assistant business
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnono
Last release2026-09-212026-08-31
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)2/5 (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-Flash-Next

A large sparse cousin with 6B active parameters for agentic coding and multimodal work, previewing Qwen's next architecture. It needs a 128 GB Mac for Ollama's MLX build or about 144 GB for the 4-bit GGUF, and Qwen Cloud serves it. The main risk is a licence that needs a separate deal for hosted-model and coding or office assistant businesses.

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-Flash-Next

  1. On a 128 GB Mac start it with ollama run qwen3.8-flash-next:125b-mlx (105 GB, NVFP4), on Linux the smallest Ollama build is qwen3.8-flash-next:125b-a6b-q4_K_M at 120 GB, which won't fit a 107.4 GB GPU share
  2. On a server, vllm serve Qwen/Qwen3.8-Flash-Next-FP8 --tensor-parallel-size 4 --max-model-len 262144 --reasoning-parser qwen3 --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser qwen3_coder
  3. Use the qwen3_coder tool parser and the qwen3 reasoning parser, as Qwen's GitHub README does
  4. Thinking is on by default, pass chat_template_kwargs with enable_thinking false to skip it, and read the reasoning from reasoning_content, even though SGLang's cookbook says thinking can't be turned off
  5. reasoning_effort takes xhigh (default), medium or low, and any other value makes the template raise an error
  6. Send at most one system message and put it first, since the template raises an error otherwise
  7. 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
  8. vLLM keeps the 51B n-gram table in host memory on 80 GB GPUs by default, per its recipe
  9. Validate JSON output yourself or use the runtime's guided decoding, since structured output isn't documented
  10. Read the Qwen Community License before serving it to others as an API or inside a coding or office assistant product

Questions

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

Qwen3.8-Flash-Next and MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B score within a point of each other on agent readiness, 61.8 (C) and 61 (C). MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B leads on reach and risk.

Other comparisons with MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B or Qwen3.8-Flash-Next

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