A paper on open model adoption and finds Chinese models, led by Qwen, now dominate.
China passed the U.S. in open model downloads in summer 2025.
By March 2026, Chinese models had 1.15B tracked downloads, while U.S. models had 723M.
Most of that shift comes from Qwen, which became the default base family for many builders.
Qwen’s lead is not just about 1 famous model; it comes from having many useful models across many sizes, especially small ones that people can run cheaply and reuse often.
DeepSeek matters in a different way: it does not dominate the whole open model ecosystem like Qwen, but it leads the very large model category, especially models above 250B param
After adjusting for model size and age, some U.S. models like GPT-OSS 120B and Nemotron Super 120B still show very strong adoption momentum, even though China leads overall.
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Link – arxiv. org/abs/2604.07190
Title: "The ATOM Report: Measuring the Open Language Model Ecosystem"
