Alibaba's open models were downloaded three billion times in six months — about five times Meta and Google combined for the year
Hugging Face published its state of open models report on 14 August, and the headline number belongs to Alibaba: the Qwen family passed three billion downloads in the past six months. Google's open models drew 418 million across 2026 and Meta's 227 million, so Qwen alone is roughly five times the two put together. Alibaba says it has open-sourced more than 460 models, and the community has built over 300,000 derivatives on top of them. 'Qwen has become part of the default workflow for developers deciding what models to fine-tune and deploy,' the report says.
Why it mattersLlama defined what an open model meant for two years, and these download counts say that era is over. Downloads are not revenue and not quality, but they are the closest available measure of what people actually build on — and the base layer of the open ecosystem is now Chinese. That reaches downstream into licences, into which languages the models were tuned for, into the safety choices baked in before you ever see them, and into the comfortable assumption that a model you run on your own hardware carries no politics with it. It also explains the timing of the American letter this week asking governments to pick a side.
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