Alibaba’s open source Qwen has overtaken Western rivals to become the world’s most downloaded AI model, showing how openness, scale and community-driven innovation are reshaping global AI leadership.
Alibaba’s Qwen has emerged as the world’s most popular open source artificial intelligence system, recording 700 million downloads on the Hugging Face platform as of January, according to data shared by the Qwen team.
The milestone places Qwen at the top of the global open-source AI ecosystem, after it overtook Meta’s Llama in cumulative downloads by October 2025, establishing leadership among open-source large language models.
Momentum accelerated sharply in December 2025, when Qwen’s single-month downloads surpassed the combined total of the next eight most popular models, including Meta, DeepSeek, OpenAI, Mistral, Nvidia, Zhipu.AI, Moonshot and MiniMax.
Alibaba open sourced Qwen in 2023, becoming the first major Chinese technology company to publicly release a homegrown large language model. Since then, the Qwen family has expanded rapidly, supporting both text and multimodal tasks across 119 languages and regional dialects.
To date, Alibaba has open-sourced nearly 400 Qwen models, enabling the global developer community to create more than 180,000 derivative versions, cementing Qwen’s position as the world’s most prolific open LLM family by scale, adoption and community participation.
The Qwen team said that since the second half of 2025, Qwen’s global download growth rate has ranked first among the five major open-source model vendors.
“Our core goal remains to keep pushing the performance frontier of LLMs while staying committed to open source openness so that AI can truly help more people around the world,” said a Qwen team researcher.
