Alibaba Qwen open-source models cross 3 billion global downloads, top globally
A Hugging Face open-models report on Aug 14 showed the Qwen family passing 3 billion cumulative downloads, ahead of Google and Meta.
Hugging Face published its open-models report on August 14, 2026. The report showed the Qwen family of open-source models passing 3 billion cumulative downloads over the prior six months, surpassing Meta and Google parent Alphabet to become the most-downloaded open-weight AI model family in the world. The report disclosed Google's 2026 downloads at about 418 million and Meta's at about 227 million, with substantial gaps to Qwen.
Alibaba said Qwen has open-sourced more than 460 models, with more than 300,000 derivative models in the wider ecosystem. The Hugging Face report noted that Qwen has become one of the default workflows developers reach for when deciding which models to fine-tune and deploy. Bloomberg and ITHome covered the trend. Alibaba also makes Qwen available to enterprise customers in Southeast Asia and Africa through its cloud platform.
The report noted that the largest open models released in 2026 by Chinese frontier AI labs tend to exceed the parameter size of American labs' largest releases. Amid the ongoing US-China AI competition, Qwen, Moonshot AI, and DeepSeek are trying to match the frontier performance of closed-source US models from OpenAI and Anthropic.