HuggingFace just published their biannual State of Open Models report covering January to August 2026. The headline numbers are big — 2.96 million public model repos, 1 million datasets, 1.44 million Spaces. But the interesting findings are in what the data reveals about how power in open AI has shifted.
What actually changed
Chinese labs own frontier scale. In almost every month of 2026, the largest open models came from Chinese labs — up to 2.78 trillion parameters. US labs peaked at 130B in most months, with NVIDIA's Nemotron Ultra (561B) and Thinking Machines' Inkling (952B) as exceptions. The two organisations publishing the most new open models this year are AMD and NVIDIA — hardware vendors, not model labs.
Qwen is the community's base model. 151,448 derivative models built on Qwen — 2.6× Meta's total footprint and 4.7× Llama specifically. Around 180–210 new Qwen derivatives appear per day. 39.6 million GGUF downloads per month, nearly twice Gemma's 20.8M and five times Llama's 7.5M.
Attention ≠ adoption. The top 25 models by likes and top 25 by downloads share exactly one entry. all-MiniLM-L6-v2 was downloaded 1.55 billion times in seven months; Kimi-K3 got roughly 60 downloads per like. Not one model published in 2026 appears in the download top 25. Thirteen of the top 25 date from 2022.
