Side-by-side comparison of Gemma 4 26B A4B Instruct (Google DeepMind · United States) and Ling-2.6 Flash (inclusionAI · China) for self-hosted deployment of the open-weight model. Gemma 4 26B A4B Instruct is rated conditional; Ling-2.6 Flash is conditional. They part ways on licence: Gemma 4 26B A4B Instruct is "Apache 2.0", Ling-2.6 Flash is "MIT".
| Field | ||
|---|---|---|
| Summary | ||
| Verdict | Conditional Based on published licence terms, Gemma 4 26B A4B ships under pure Apache 2.0 with no prohibited-use carve-outs — a departure from prior Gemma generations. The sparse-MoE architecture (25.2B total / 3.8B active) puts it in an ambiguous zone for EU AI Act GPAI systemic-risk classification, and US origin plus image-input support add transparency obligations that deployers should document. | Conditional Per the published model card, Ling-2.6 Flash is an MIT-licensed 104B / 7.4B-active MoE built on a hybrid Lightning-Linear + MLA attention design, positioned for agentic and tool-use workflows. Permissive weights are deployable in EU infrastructure; the headline risks for regulated buyers are vendor jurisdiction (Ant Group's inclusionAI lab, headquartered in China) and the absence of any training-data disclosure in the model card. |
| Last reviewed | 2026-04-17 | 2026-05-03 |
| Open-weight | ||
| Licence | Apache 2.0 | MIT |
| Commercial use | Unrestricted | Unrestricted |
| Training data | Domain-level summary | Undisclosed |
| Origin | United States | China |
| Performance & pricing? | ||
| Quality index | 27/100 | — |
| Speed | — | — |
| Blended price | — | — |
| Context window | — | — |
| Evidence | ||
| Sources | ||
No overlapping sources between the two entries.