Ahead of Meta and Google: Over 3 billion downloads in half a year for Alibaba's open AI models

Alibaba Group's open models have accumulated more than 3 billion downloads worldwide in the last six months, surpassing Meta, Alphabet, and local competitors to become the world's leading artificial intelligence (AI) models. This is according to a report by Bloomberg.

Qwen, Alibaba's family of AI models, has been open-sourced for more than 460 models, and its ecosystem has spawned more than 300,000 derivative versions, the Chinese tech company said in an email statement. According to Hugging Face, a popular platform for open AI models that published a report on the state of open models on August 14, Google's models, owned by Alphabet, received 418 million downloads, while Meta's models reached 227 million downloads in 2026.

Open models can be downloaded, customized, and used as building blocks for new AI products, so their adoption rate serves as a metric for the technologies developers choose to build on. Thus, download data and the number of derivative models have become one of the indicators of influence in the AI race between the US and China, as Chinese developers, including Alibaba, push high-capability models that are relatively cheap and easy to adapt.

The rise of Qwen indicates that this strategy is gaining momentum outside of China as well. Qwen, along with Moonshot AI, DeepSeek, and other Chinese companies building AI models, are replicating performance at the level of frontier models and trying to close the gap with closed models in the US, such as those from OpenAI and Anthropic. Restrictions on the export of chips and AI systems, such as the short-lived ban this summer on access from abroad to Anthropic's Fable 5 model, do not appear to be slowing down the Chinese competitors.

The download data for Qwen, owned by Alibaba, makes it "one of the largest cornerstones of the open AI ecosystem," the Hugging Face report stated. The tech company, headquartered in Hangzhou and operating in cloud computing, e-commerce, and AI, is gaining momentum against local competitors DeepSeek, Moonshot Kimi, and MiniMax, as well as against American models.

"Qwen has become part of the default workflow for developers deciding which models to fine-tune and deploy," the report said.

According to the Bloomberg report, a broad family of models can create a self-reinforcing ecosystem: more developers adopt the models, more derivative versions are built, and these in turn attract new users. Alibaba has strengthened this cycle by distributing Qwen through its cloud platform to business customers in markets including Southeast Asia and Africa, thereby giving the model a reach that many of its competitors lack. American tech giants are responding to the trend. In recent weeks, Meta and Nvidia have released new open AI models amid intensifying competition for developers.