China's Alibaba open-weight artificial intelligence (AI) Qwen model family has surpassed 3 billion downloads. With this, Qwen has overtaken Meta and Google to become the world's most-downloaded open-source AI model family.
On the 18th, according to Bloomberg, according to a recently released open-source model status report by the AI platform Hugging Face, the Qwen model recorded about 2.045 billion downloads on the Hugging Face Hub in 2026. This far outpaces Google's roughly 418 million and Meta's roughly 227 million.
This figure counts downloads only on Hugging Face and excludes downloads from other platforms, including China's ModelScope. Therefore, Bloomberg expected that Qwen's cumulative downloads across all platforms would exceed 3 billion.
According to Alibaba, Qwen has open-sourced more than 460 models so far, leading to the creation of over 300,000 derivative models. Qwen's rapid spread reflects intensifying competition over which models will become the foundational infrastructure for AI applications. Developers can use open source to fine-tune for specific industries and languages, compress models to run on personal computers or other devices, and integrate them into new applications.
This ecosystem effect is becoming more important as AI competition expands beyond the few corporations capable of developing cutting-edge models. A widely adopted open-source model can underpin thousands of downstream products even if the original developer does not operate them directly.
The Hugging Face report also noted that the gap in open model scale and licenses between research institutes in China and the United States is widening.
According to the report, in 2026 the largest open models released by major Chinese AI research institutes generally had more parameters than those released by U.S. institutes. The monthly maximum parameter count for Chinese institute models ranged from 754 billion to 2.78 trillion, while the largest U.S. open models stayed below 130 billion parameters in most months.
China Daily said, "These figures suggest that the landscape of global open-source AI competition is shifting," and reported, "Chinese models are not only competing on benchmark performance and expense, but are also building increasingly large developer ecosystems, threatening the open-source AI market long led by Meta's Llama family."