🌍Chinese Labs Topped Open-Model Size Every Month of 2026
TL;DR
Hugging Face's summer report finds that in almost every month of 2026 the largest open model from a Chinese lab exceeded anything a US lab shipped. China's monthly ceiling ran 754B to 2.78T parameters while US releases stayed under 130B in five of seven months.
Hugging Face's summer report finds that in almost every month of 2026 the largest open model from a Chinese lab exceeded anything a US lab shipped. China's monthly ceiling ran 754B to 2.78T parameters while US releases stayed under 130B in five of seven months. Downloads tell a different story than likes.
Key Points
Public model repos grew 2.43M to 2.96M; 1.5% of repos account for 99.2% of downloads
Of 178 Chinese releases above 20B params, 59% are Apache 2.0 and 22% MIT
Qwen has 151,448 derivatives on the Hub, 2.6x Meta's footprint; 180-210 new ones per day
Models under 1B take 83% of all-time downloads; anything above 100B takes 1%
Claude Code led July agent traffic to the Hub at 44.4%, down from 67.8% in April as Codex climbed to 20.8%
Why It Matters
The report separates attention from adoption with hard numbers: exactly one repo appears in both the top-25 by downloads and top-25 by likes, which should end the habit of citing likes as market share.
Quick Facts
Frequently Asked Questions
Why does this matter?
The report separates attention from adoption with hard numbers: exactly one repo appears in both the top-25 by downloads and top-25 by likes, which should end the habit of citing likes as market share.
What happened?
Hugging Face's summer report finds that in almost every month of 2026 the largest open model from a Chinese lab exceeded anything a US lab shipped. China's monthly ceiling ran 754B to 2.78T parameters while US releases stayed under 130B in five of seven months.
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