Qwen is the world’s most downloaded open model, by a smaller margin than Alibaba says

Alibaba says its Qwen models have passed 3 billion downloads, making them the most used open-weight family in the world. The Hugging Face report published a day earlier counts 2,045 million for Qwen this year, and 151,448 derivatives against Alibaba’s claim of more than 300,000.

Alibaba says its Qwen models have passed 3 billion downloads, putting the family ahead of anything from Meta or Google. It is the clearest claim yet that Chinese labs are winning the open-weight race.

The report it rests on says something slightly different. Hugging Face’s State of Open Models, published the day before, counts 2,045 million Qwen downloads this year, or 2,061 million including every repository. The 3 billion figure came from Alibaba’s own emailed statement.

The gap does not change who is first. It does mean the headline number is about a third larger than the platform being cited actually recorded.

The same pattern appears in the derivatives. Alibaba says its ecosystem has produced more than 300,000 derivative models, while Hugging Face counts 151,448 Qwen-based derivatives on its Hub, which is still 2.6 times Meta’s entire footprint there.

This is familiar ground. TNW noted earlier that Alibaba called Qwen3.8 the world’s second-best model and showed no proof.

Hugging Face is careful about what its numbers mean. Downloads measure activity inside its own hub and do not capture API usage, private deployments or models distributed elsewhere, and Alibaba runs its own distribution platform in ModelScope.

None of which touches the direction of travel. “Qwen has become part of the default workflow for developers deciding what models to fine-tune and deploy,” the report says.

The method is volume and reach. Alibaba has open-sourced more than 460 models under permissive licences and pushes them through its cloud into Southeast Asia and Africa, though it has also said it wants to charge the heaviest users of those open models.

American labs are answering in kind. Meta and Nvidia have both shipped new open models in recent weeks, and Nvidia has been explicit that it is chasing China on open weights.

The bigger threat to Qwen’s run may be domestic. Beijing has been weighing curbs on overseas access to the country’s best models, which would take the reach that produced these numbers away.