Qwen3.6-35B-A3B opens 35B MoE weights with 3B active parameters

What the tweet revealed

The Qwen account wrote “Meet Qwen3.6-35B-A3B: Now Open-Source” and described the model as a sparse MoE with 35B total parameters, 3B active, and an Apache 2.0 license. That is high-signal because Alibaba is not only shipping an API endpoint; it is releasing open weights for a model meant to cover agentic coding, multimodal perception, and reasoning modes.

Alibaba_Qwen is the official model account for Qwen releases, and the post was amplified by Hugging Face’s feed, which is why it surfaced strongly in the crawl. The linked Qwen blog and Hugging Face card give the technical substance behind the tweet: Qwen3.6-35B-A3B is a fully open-source MoE model, available through Qwen Studio and open-weight hosting, with API access for the related Qwen3.6-Flash path coming through Model Studio.

The benchmark signal

The strongest coding numbers are in the blog’s agentic table. Qwen lists 73.4 on SWE-bench Verified, 67.2 on SWE-bench Multilingual, and 51.5 on Terminal-Bench 2.0. Those scores are the reason the tweet’s claim about coding “on par with models 10x its active size” matters: the model only activates 3B parameters at inference time, so the practical question is whether it can keep costs low while preserving agent behavior.

The model also targets multimodal use. Qwen highlights strong perception and reasoning, plus thinking and non-thinking modes. That mix puts it in the same competitive lane as compact agent models that need to inspect screenshots, reason over code, and call tools without demanding frontier-model serving budgets. Open weights and Apache 2.0 licensing make it easier for labs and companies to test those claims inside their own stacks.

What to watch next is whether independent SWE-bench and Terminal-Bench runs reproduce the official numbers, how inference cost compares with dense models, and whether Qwen3.6-Flash API availability closes the gap between open-weight experimentation and managed deployment. Source: Qwen X post · Qwen blog · Hugging Face model page