State of Open Source on Hugging Face: Spring 2026
China now leads downloads, independent developers rival industry, and the geographic power balance has fundamentally shifted.
The open source AI ecosystem has entered a new era. According to Hugging Face's latest annual report, the platform now hosts 11 million users, over 2 million public models, and more than 500,000 datasets. But raw growth numbers mask a more profound transformation: the geographic and economic center of gravity in open source AI has shifted eastward, and independent developers now rival large labs in influence.
The China Surge
The most striking finding: China has surpassed the United States in both monthly and overall model downloads on Hugging Face. Chinese models now account for 41% of all downloads—a plurality. This shift accelerated dramatically after DeepSeek released its R1 model in January 2025, which the report describes as a "viral" moment that triggered widespread adoption of Chinese open models.
The numbers are stark. Baidu went from zero releases on Hugging Face in 2024 to over 100 in 2025. ByteDance and Tencent each increased releases by eight to nine times. Organizations that had previously favored closed approaches—including Baidu and MiniMax—shifted decisively toward open releases.
The Independent Rise
Industry's share of overall development fell from around 70% before 2022 to roughly 37% in 2025. Meanwhile, independent or unaffiliated developers rose from 17% to 39% of all downloads—sometimes exceeding half of total usage.
"Individuals and small collectives focused on quantizing, adapting, and redistributing base models," the report notes. "These intermediaries now steer a meaningful portion of what typical users can run and how innovations spread through the ecosystem."
The Qwen family alone has generated over 113,000 derivative models.
Concentration Remains High
Despite the democratization, the ecosystem remains highly concentrated. Approximately half of all models have fewer than 200 downloads, while the top 200 models (0.01% of the catalog) account for 49.6% of all downloads.
Other Notable Trends
The Big Picture
The geographic rebalancing has strategic implications. Western organizations are increasingly seeking commercially deployable alternatives to Chinese models, creating urgency around efforts like OpenAI's GPT-OSS, AI2's OLMo, and Google's Gemma. Whether these can match the adoption momentum of Qwen and DeepSeek will define the next phase of open source AI.
Primary source: Hugging Face Blog
Cited research: Longpre et al., "Economies of Open Intelligence: Tracing Power & Participation in the Model Ecosystem"