Qwen3.6-35B-A3B
genuinely apache 2.0 and genuinely small — and constantly confused with the closed flagship sharing its brand.
an unusually strong small model under clean apache 2.0 — the trap is definitional, because the 'qwen' name also covers a closed api-only flagship.
the licence file is standard unmodified apache 2.0 with a 2026 alibaba cloud copyright and no appendix. at 35b total with just 3b active, alibaba describes it as performing on par with models ten times its active size, reporting 73.4 on swe-bench and 51.5 on terminal-bench 2.0 — vendor figures, not independently verified.
the confusion worth avoiding: qwen3.7-max, announced in may as the flagship, has no hugging face repository, no weights and no committed release date. it is api-only through alibaba cloud and resold through openrouter and together. roundups that place '3.7' alongside the open qwen line are describing two different products, and only one of them is open.
the description above is ours, condensed from the ranking. pricing moves — check it on the vendor's own page before you rely on it.
- category
- open-weight llms
- pricing
- free (apache 2.0)
- website
- huggingface.co
an unusually strong small model under clean apache 2.0 — the trap is definitional, because the 'qwen' name also covers a closed api-only flagship.
we researched this category against vendors' own pricing pages and licence files. that is where this line comes from — not from the vendor, and not from anything they paid for.