Alibaba's Qwen Models Achieve Nearly 1 Billion Downloads, Dominating Open-Source AI Market

Alibaba's Qwen AI models reportedly captured over 50% of the global open-source AI market, reaching 942.1 million cumulative downloads by March 2026. The latest Qwen 3.5 release achieves performance comparable to leading closed-source models while offering significantly lower token costs, with over 100,000 derivative models built on the platform.