Everything about Qwen3.5 9B

Overview

Alibaba Cloud (Qwen) released Qwen3.5 9B on February 23, 2026. It has a reasoning mode: it can "think" before answering, which helps with multi-step problems but uses more tokens, and therefore more money. It is an open-weight model: you can host it yourself on infrastructure you control, and 22 API providers listed on models.dev also offer it. That makes it 8 months old as of October 22, 2026.

We file it under open-weight models (68 models in this category on the site).

What do independent benchmarks say?

According to results published by Epoch AI (checked on October 22, 2026), Qwen3.5 9B has a capability index of 49.6 out of 100, computed on 3 benchmarks from our basket.

With only 3 benchmarks reported, it does not enter the public ranking, which requires at least 4 results, so its index should be read as partial.

• GPQA Diamond (PhD-level science questions): 79% — the best tracked model, Gemini 4 Argon, reaches 96.4%
• OTIS Mock AIME (competition mathematics problems): 61.7% — the best tracked model, GPT-5.5 Pro, reaches 100%
• Terminal-Bench (agent tasks in a terminal): 9.2% — the best tracked model, GPT-5.5, reaches 84.7%

What it costs

Qwen3.5 9B costs $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.15 per million output tokens (median of 22 providers, checked on October 22, 2026).

In practice, an agent task that reads 20,000 tokens and writes 2,000 costs about $0.002, or $2.3 for 1,000 such tasks.

That is 6.7 times cheaper than the median output price of open-weight models ($1).

To estimate your own budget, use the agent cost calculator.

Context and capabilities

Its context window reaches 262,144 tokens, roughly 393 pages of text at 500 words per page: enough for a long report or several contracts at once. A single answer can run to 262,144 tokens.

It accepts as input: text.

It can call tools (functions, APIs), which makes it a possible foundation for an AI agent.

The weights are published on Hugging Face (Qwen/Qwen3.5-9B). See also our list of open-source models.

Who is it for?

Given its category, Qwen3.5 9B is mainly aimed at projects where you want control over your data or hosting, or want to adapt the model to your field.

Its very low cost (under half a cent for our sample task) means it can be called thousands of times a day.

Before adopting it, test it on your own examples: benchmarks measure standard tasks, not your job.

Alternatives

In the same category, the models closest to Qwen3.5 9B are:

• Qwen3.6 35B-A3B (Alibaba Cloud (Qwen), index 55.3)
• MiniMax-M3 (MiniMax, index 55.5)
• Qwen3.5 397B-A17B (Alibaba Cloud (Qwen), index 59.2)
• DeepSeek V3.2 (DeepSeek, index 59.8)