By Shimul Sood
Publication Date: 2026-08-16 15:22:00
The AI race usually revolves around familiar names like OpenAI, Google, Meta, and Anthropic. But when it comes to models developers can actually download and build upon, another company has raced to the front — and by quite some distance. Alibaba says its Qwen family of open-weight AI models has crossed 3 billion downloads globally over the past six months. That puts Qwen ahead of some of the biggest names in AI, including models from Meta and Google.
The difference is especially striking in Hugging Face data for 2026. Google’s open models have recorded around 418 million downloads, while Meta sits at roughly 227 million, according to Hugging Face’s latest State of Open Models report. Qwen, meanwhile, is becoming much more than one popular model. Alibaba has released more than 460 Qwen models, and developers have created over 300,000 derivative models from them.
Developers are building on Qwen, not just downloading it
Those download numbers matter because open…
