Alibaba's open model Qwen3.6 leads Google's Gemma 4 across agentic coding benchmarks

Alibaba has released Qwen3.6-35B-A3B, a new open AI model. The mixture-of-experts model activates just three of its 35 billion parameters at a time, cutting compute costs without meaningfully hurting quality, according to Alibaba.

Alibaba says the model significantly outperforms its predecessor, Qwen3.5-35B-A3B, on agentic coding tasks. Against Google's open Gemma 4-31B, it leads every coding benchmark listed, scoring 73.4 to 52.0 on SWE-bench Verified and 51.5 to 42.9 on Terminal-Bench 2.0. It also edges ahead on reasoning tests like GPQA (86.0 to 84.3) and AIME26 (92.7 to 89.2). Alibaba claims it even keeps pace with Claude Sonnet 4.5 on image and video tasks.

The model offers both thinking and non-thinking modes. Users can try it in Qwen Studio, access it via API as Qwen3.6 Flash through Alibaba Cloud Model Studio, or download the weights from Hugging Face and ModelScope. The release follows the launch of the larger Qwen3.6-Plus.