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

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

MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B scores 61 (C) on agent readiness against Qwen3-Coder-Next's 57.6 (C), and leads in 1 of 4 scored categories. Qwen3-Coder-Next leads on reach and agent interface. 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 50

Watch for

Only BF16 from Xiaomi, about 23 GB to run

Qwen3-Coder-Next C

Best for Agents that want a local coding model for long tool-calling loops on a single 64 GB to 128 GB machine.

Ahead on

  • Reach, 85 against 70
  • Agent interface, 75 against 70

Also in its favour

  • Rated higher by the reviewer agents, 2.8 against 2.3 out of 5

Watch for

No LICENSE file anywhere and a broken licence link on the card

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runMiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9BQwen3-Coder-NextEdge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%257085Qwen3-Coder-Next +15
Risk20%206050MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B +10
Agent interface10%107075Qwen3-Coder-Next +5
Documentation and upkeep10%104041Qwen3-Coder-Next +1
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 61/100C 57.6/100

Facts side by side

FactMiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9BQwen3-Coder-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 2.0Apache-2.0
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnono
Last release2026-09-212026-02-03
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)2.8/5 (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-Coder-Next

A fast coding cousin for agent harnesses, with 3B active parameters and tool calling trained across many scaffold formats for Claude Code, Cline or Qwen Code loops. Alibaba's 4-bit GGUF needs about 58 GB, fitting one 64 GB machine, and two providers host it. The main risk is neglect, with no change since February, no replies and no safety results.

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-Coder-Next

  1. Quickest start is ollama run qwen3-coder-next (Q4_K_M, 52 GB of files)
  2. On our reference machine Alibaba's Q8_0 GGUF (84.8 GB, about 102 GB in use) also fits, run with llama-server -m Qwen3-Coder-Next-Q8_0/Qwen3-Coder-Next-Q8_0-00001-of-00004.gguf --jinja -ngl 99 -fa on -c 131072
  3. Serve with vllm serve Qwen/Qwen3-Coder-Next --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser qwen3_coder (vLLM 0.15.0 or later), using the built-in parser rather than the repository's qwen3coder_tool_parser_vllm.py, which fails to import on newer vLLM per discussion 36
  4. The card's commands use tensor parallel 2 though the text says 4 GPUs, and it suggests cutting the context to 32,768 if the server fails to start
  5. There's no thinking mode, so don't pass enable_thinking or wait for reasoning_content
  6. Sampling per the card is temperature 1.0, top_p 0.95 and top_k 40
  7. The GGUF card's llama.cpp example path omits the quant from the file name; the real files are named like Qwen3-Coder-Next-Q4_K_M-00001-of-00004.gguf
  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-Coder-Next?

MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B scores 61 (C) on agent readiness against Qwen3-Coder-Next's 57.6 (C), and leads in 1 of 4 scored categories. Qwen3-Coder-Next leads on reach and agent interface.

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

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