Qwen3.6-35B Distilled from Claude Opus 4.6 Runs Locally at 13 GB RAM
A community-released GGUF, Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-Claude-4.6-Opus-Reasoning-Distilled, has gone viral on HuggingFace. The model is a MoE architecture with ~3B active parameters out of 35B total, distilled from Claude Opus 4.6 intermediate reasoning traces rather than just final answers. In a live demo, the 2-bit quantized version performed a full agentic bug hunt in 13 GB of RAM: 30+ tool calls, 20 websites searched, code executed, bug reproduced, fix written, tests added, and a PR opened. The author explicitly flags that distilling from closed commercial model outputs likely violates Anthropic's Terms of Service, with long-term weight availability uncertain.
Why It Matters
The technical achievement is real: frontier-reasoning capability distilled into a model that runs on consumer hardware with 13 GB of RAM. The legal signal is also real: provider ToS around distillation are becoming a contested frontier as the community discovers it can extract reasoning patterns without access to model weights.