# Xiaomi distills MiMo V2.6 into a 9B model

> The new MiMo-V2.6-Distill-Qwen-9B targets agentic workloads, coding, and tool use in a size that fits on modest hardware.

Published by The Open Weights on Sep 21, 2026. Canonical: https://theopenweights.com/news/mimo-v2-6-distill-qwen-9b-zef5

## Key facts

- Company: Xiaomi
- Model: MiMo-V2.6
- Version: V2.6-Distill-9B
- Category: Vision-Language
- Modalities: Vision-Language, Text / LLM, Code
- License: Other (Open weights, commercial use allowed)
- Parameters: 9B
- Context window: 262K tokens
- Architecture: Qwen3_5ForConditionalGeneration
- Precision: BF16
- Weights size: 18.8 GB
- Significance: minor
- Published: 2026-09-21
- Last verified: 2026-10-05
- Hugging Face: https://huggingface.co/XiaomiMiMo/MiMo-V2.6-Distill-Qwen-9B
- Canonical URL: https://theopenweights.com/news/mimo-v2-6-distill-qwen-9b-zef5

Xiaomi has published [MiMo-V2.6-Distill-Qwen-9B](https://huggingface.co/XiaomiMiMo/MiMo-V2.6-Distill-Qwen-9B), a nine-billion-parameter model distilled from the company's larger MiMo V2.6 system. The release is aimed squarely at agentic behavior, coding, and tool-use scenarios rather than general chat, and it builds on a Qwen base to reach that footprint.

Distillation is the core idea here: instead of training a small model from scratch, Xiaomi transfers behavior from a stronger teacher model into a more compact student. The payoff is a model that can run on far less demanding hardware while retaining a slice of the capabilities that make bigger systems useful for multi-step tasks.

## Why it matters

Much of the practical demand for open models sits in the 7B–13B range, where a single consumer or workstation GPU is enough to serve real workloads. A 9B model tuned for agents and tool calling slots neatly into that gap.

- Sized for accessible hardware in the 7B–13B tier
- Focused on agentic, coding, and tool-use tasks
- Distilled from Xiaomi's MiMo V2.6 rather than trained fresh
- Built on a Qwen base and released on Hugging Face

The model is distributed under a custom license, so teams planning to build on it should check the terms on the [model page](https://huggingface.co/XiaomiMiMo/MiMo-V2.6-Distill-Qwen-9B) before deploying. As with any distilled release, the real test will be how much of the parent model's agentic strength survives the shrink.

## Get the model

- [Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/XiaomiMiMo/MiMo-V2.6-Distill-Qwen-9B)

## Sources

- [XiaomiMiMo/MiMo-V2.6-Distill-Qwen-9B](https://huggingface.co/XiaomiMiMo/MiMo-V2.6-Distill-Qwen-9B) — Hugging Face, Sep 21, 2026

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Source: The Open Weights (https://theopenweights.com/). Aggregated and written by Claude, curated by humans. Cite as: "Xiaomi distills MiMo V2.6 into a 9B model", The Open Weights, Sep 21, 2026, https://theopenweights.com/news/mimo-v2-6-distill-qwen-9b-zef5