Alibaba Qwen tops global open-source AI downloads, outpacing Google and Meta - CHOSUNBIZ

Ah, marvellous. While American tech giants were busy testifying to Congress about the existential threat of Chinese AI, the Chinese quietly got on with the washing-up. Hugging Face's open-source status report shows Alibaba's Qwen sitting pretty on about 2.045 billion downloads in 2026, while Google lags at roughly 418 million and Meta — the company that gifted the world Llama — scrapes along at 227 million. In most months, the report notes, Chinese institutes have been releasing larger open models than their US counterparts. You can almost hear the Silicon Valley strategy decks being hastily re-PowerPointed into a new narrative.

The same open-weight wave we flagged last week has now acquired a rather inconvenient sales chart. The Americans keep declaring victory over closed-source advantage while the open-source commons gets increasingly fluent in Mandarin coding comments. Somewhere, a US trade official is staring at a download dashboard and contemplating a career in goat yoga.

There is a delicious irony in the fact that the very platforms which US models helped popularise are now the distribution system for AI models US policy is trying to contain. Alibaba didn't need a dodgy offshore server or a state-sponsored leak; it just posted its weights and let the internet do the rest. The download numbers are not just a market share metric; they are a measure of how thoroughly the cat is out of the bag, complete with documentation and a Hugging Face badge. For an industry that loves its narrative of technical supremacy, this is the awkward bit nobody put in the keynote. Cheers.