Alibaba said its Qwen open-weight models drew more than 3B downloads over the past six months, putting the family ahead of every US and Chinese rival, in an emailed statement to Bloomberg. Alibaba has released more than 460 Qwen models, and developers have built over 300k derivatives from them. Hugging Face put Google at 418M downloads and Meta at 227M across 2026 in an August 14 report, which said Qwen has become a default starting point for developers deciding what to fine-tune and deploy. Download counts serve as a rough gauge of what developers are building on, which is why they get read as a scoreboard in the US-China AI race.
