Alibaba Group Holding's Qwen has surged to the top of the global open-AI landscape, becoming the world's most downloaded open-weight model family and overtaking major rivals such as Meta and Google.
According to Alibaba and data from open-source AI platform Hugging Face, more than 3 billion downloads of Qwen had been recorded globally over the past six months.
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Qwen's rapid adoption underscores the growing influence of Chinese AI models and their expanding role in the increasingly competitive global artificial intelligence race.
Alibaba has open-sourced more than 460 Qwen models, while its ecosystem has generated more than 300,000 derivative models, the company said in an emailed statement.
Hugging Face's State of Open Models report, published on August 14, showed that Google models recorded 418 million downloads, while Meta models had 227 million downloads in 2026.
Open-weight models can be downloaded, customised and used as foundations for new AI applications. Their adoption and the number of derivative models have therefore become important indicators of developer interest as the US and China compete for influence in artificial intelligence.
Qwen's rapid growth also underscores the appeal of Chinese models that offer competitive performance at relatively low cost and can be adapted for specific applications.
Alongside Alibaba, companies including DeepSeek, Moonshot AI and MiniMax are seeking to narrow the gap with leading closed models from OpenAI and Anthropic.
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Hugging Face described Qwen as “one of the largest foundations of the open AI ecosystem”, noting that it has increasingly become part of the default workflow for developers looking to fine-tune and deploy AI models.
Alibaba has further expanded Qwen's reach through its cloud business, supplying models to enterprise customers in markets including Southeast Asia and Africa.
US technology companies are responding, with Meta and Nvidia recently unveiling new open AI models as competition for developers intensifies.
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