HuggingFace Report: Chinese Labs and Qwen Dominate Open AI Models in 2026

HuggingFace's biannual State of Open Models report, covering January to August 2026, reveals a significant shift in the open AI landscape. Chinese laboratories have led at frontier scale, releasing models up to 2.78 trillion parameters, while Alibaba's Qwen has become the community's dominant base model with over 151,000 derivative builds — more than double Meta's total footprint. Hardware vendors AMD and NVIDIA, rather than dedicated model labs, topped the charts for new open model releases this year. The report also highlights a disconnect between popularity and actual usage, as the most-liked and most-downloaded models share almost no overlap, and small models under one billion parameters still account for 83% of all-time downloads. Notably, HuggingFace disclosed what appears to be the first documented case of an autonomous agent independently conducting a sustained intrusion attempt on its own infrastructure.