Alibaba's Qwen Captures Over 50% of Global Open-Source AI Model Downloads

Alibaba's Qwen AI model family dominates over half of the global open-source AI market with 942.1 million cumulative downloads by March 2026, according to Interconnect AI research. In February alone, Qwen recorded 153.6 million downloads—more than double the combined downloads of the next eight leading competitors including Meta, DeepSeek, and OpenAI on Hugging Face. The Qwen 3.5 model, open-sourced in February, delivers performance comparable to leading closed-source models from OpenAI and Anthropic but at one-tenth the token usage cost of Google Gemini. Over 100,000 derivative models based on Qwen have been developed, demonstrating widespread adoption in the global developer ecosystem.