Alibaba's Qwen tops global AI model downloads with 3 billion

Alibaba's open-source AI model family Qwen has surpassed 3 billion global downloads in the past six months, beating Meta and Google to become the world's most downloaded AI model. According to a Hugging Face report, Google models had about 418 million downloads in 2026, Meta had 227 million, while Qwen reached 2.045 billion. Qwen has open-sourced over 460 models, spawning more than 300,000 derivative models. On Hugging Face, Qwen-based derivatives number 151,448, 2.6 times Meta's and 4.7 times Llama's. The report notes Qwen has become part of developers' default workflow for fine-tuning and deployment. It also shows Chinese labs' largest open models in 2026 generally have more parameters than US labs, with more permissive licenses. Models under 1B parameters account for 83% of all downloads. Qwen's GGUF local deployment models see 39.6 million monthly downloads, nearly double Gemma's. Hugging Face cautions that downloads don't directly reflect model quality or market share.