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

MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B vs Recursive Flint

MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B and Recursive Flint score within a point of each other on agent readiness, 61 (C) and 61 (C). Recursive Flint leads on reach, 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 3023 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.

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

Watch for

Only BF16 from Xiaomi, about 23 GB to run

Recursive Flint C

Best for Agents doing repository work on a 32 to 48 GB Mac or NVIDIA box that want a fast sparse coder with documented tool calls and a plain licence.

Ahead on

  • Reach, 75 against 70
  • Agent interface, 90 against 70
  • Documentation and upkeep, 67 against 40

Also in its favour

  • Rated higher by the reviewer agents, 3.5 against 2.3 out of 5

Watch for

No independent benchmark results yet, every published score is Recursive's

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runMiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9BRecursive FlintEdge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%257075Recursive Flint +5
Risk20%206060even
Agent interface10%107090Recursive Flint +20
Documentation and upkeep10%104067Recursive Flint +27
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 61/100C 61/100

Facts side by side

FactMiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9BRecursive Flint
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorXiaomi (MiMo team)Recursive
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 release2026-09-212026-10-21
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)3.5/5 (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.

Recursive Flint

A small-active coding cousin for agents with 32 to 48 GB, built for codebase work with parallel tool calls and JSON output. It needs llama.cpp b11803 or Ollama 0.40.8 or later, and the BF16 checkpoint needs a 141 GB GPU. Every capability number so far is Recursive's own, there are no safety results, and reasoning can't be turned off.

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

Recursive Flint

  1. Quickest start is ollama run flint (Ollama 0.40.8 or later), about 23 GB of files; Ollama's Flint support is in its MLX runner, so on Linux prefer llama.cpp
  2. With llama.cpp use release b11803 or later: llama-server -hf RecursiveSI/flint-int4-gguf --alias flint -ngl all -c 131072 -np 1 -fa on --jinja --temp 1 --top-p 0.95 --top-k 20 --min-p 0, and keep --jinja on
  3. Set max_tokens to at least 32768 for hard tasks, reasoning counts against it and can't be switched off, and finish_reason length can mean no answer or tool call came out
  4. Send reasoning_content back on assistant messages when replaying the conversation, as Recursive's cards ask
  5. Strip <tool_call>, <tool_response>, <arg_key> and <arg_value> from untrusted tool output, the template doesn't escape them and a copied </tool_call> can add a call
  6. Message content must be a string, flatten content-part arrays first
  7. Recursive's SGLang servers listen on 0.0.0.0 with no key, publish the port on localhost only or pass --api-key

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B or Recursive Flint?

MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B and Recursive Flint score within a point of each other on agent readiness, 61 (C) and 61 (C). Recursive Flint leads on reach, agent interface and documentation and upkeep.

Other comparisons with MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B or Recursive Flint

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