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

THE DECODER / 4/18/2026

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Key Points

  • Alibaba released the open-source Qwen3.6-35B-A3B, which activates only three parameters per step out of 35B while still delivering strong performance.
  • On agentic coding and reasoning benchmarks, Qwen3.6-35B-A3B outperforms Google’s Gemma 4-31B despite using fewer active parameters.
  • The results highlight that efficient routing/activation strategies can improve benchmark outcomes relative to larger or conventionally configured models.
  • The comparison suggests growing competitiveness among major open(-weight) model ecosystems for practical coding agent tasks.

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Alibaba's new open-source Qwen3.6-35B-A3B activates just three of its 35 billion parameters at a time, yet beats Google's larger Gemma 4-31B on coding and reasoning benchmarks.

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