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

Alibaba claims its Qwen AI models have surpassed 3 billion downloads, making them the most-used open-weight model family in the world, ahead of Meta and Google. However, Hugging Face's own data counts roughly 2 billion downloads, meaning Alibaba's figure is about one-third higher than what the cited platform actually recorded. Qwen still leads globally, with 151,448 derivative models, more than double Meta's footprint, but potential Chinese government restrictions on overseas access could threaten that dominance.