Alibaba AI models hit 3 billion downloads, passing Meta, Google

Alibaba’s Qwen family has turned into a very large piece of the open-model world. The company says its open-weight AI models have passed 3 billion downloads globally in the last six months, enough to put Alibaba ahead of Meta, Alphabet and domestic rivals in the race for the most-used AI model.

The scale is bigger than downloads alone. Alibaba says Qwen has been open-sourced in more than 460 models, and developers have built more than 300,000 derivatives on top of them. Hugging Face, the open-source AI hub, put Google at 418 million downloads and Meta at 227 million in 2026, in a report published on Aug. 14.

That matters because open models are meant to be picked up, modified and folded into new products. In practice, downloads and derivative models have become a rough proxy for influence in the US-China AI fight. Alibaba and other Chinese builders are betting that cheap, adaptable models will spread faster than closed systems from companies like OpenAI and Anthropic.

Qwen’s momentum suggests that bet is working beyond China. Hugging Face said Alibaba’s download numbers make Qwen “one of the largest foundations of the open AI ecosystem,” and that the model family has become part of the default workflow for developers who fine-tune and deploy models.

Alibaba is also helping the loop feed itself. The company distributes Qwen through its cloud platform to enterprise customers in places including Southeast Asia and Africa, widening its reach. And while Washington keeps trying to slow Chinese AI progress with chip and system export controls, the source material suggests those barriers have not stopped Alibaba, DeepSeek, Moonshot AI and others from pushing closer to frontier performance. Meta and Nvidia have answered with new open AI models of their own, because the developer crowd is the prize.