Our new paper Economies of Open Intelligence is out and covered by Melissa Heikkilä at the Financial Times. This work gives the clearest picture yet of how global power is shifting inside the open AI ecosystem, and what that means for the open source community that has grown around it.
Using 2.2B model downloads across 851k models, we trace how dominance in open AI has shifted dramatically over the last five years. US industry giants, once holding 40–60% of all downloads, have seen a steep decline. In 2025, for the first time, China’s model developers surpassed the U.S. in adoption, driven primarily by DeepSeek and Qwen. This shows the story of who dominates the global race for AI is not finished; it has just started!
The global race is playing out not in closed labs, but in the open weight ecosystem where adoption and influence can be directly measured.
At the same time, community developers and unaffiliated users have become the backbone of open AI. Industry once produced ~70% of downloaded models; today it’s closer to 37%. Community developers, online collectives, and individual contributors now shape more than half of the ecosystem.
The emergence of a new layer of community intermediaries (quantizers, repackagers, adapter builders) shows how much innovation and practical usability now comes from outside large labs.
This dual narrative is powerful: global AI power is shifting, and the open source community is increasingly the one steering the direction of the ecosystem.
We’re releasing the paper, the full dataset, and a live monitoring dashboard because understanding these shifts shouldn’t be restricted to insiders; it should be a public resource for researchers, policymakers, and the community itself.
Thanks for the incredible collaboration Shayne Longpre, Christopher Akiki, Campbell Lund, Atharva Kulkarni, Emily Chen ❤️
And as always, thanks to the amazing colleagues at Hugging Face who supported this work especially Lysandre Debut Avijit Ghosh, PhD Irene Solaiman Yacine Jernite