HF Summer 2026 Open Models Report

Hugging Face released the 'State of Open Models: Summer 2026 Observations' report based on Hub data from January to August 2026. During this period, open model repositories surged from 2.43 million to 2.96 million, and datasets grew from 710,000 to 1 million. However, the download distribution was extremely skewed, with the top 1.5% of repositories accounting for 99.2% of all downloads.

The report shows that Chinese labs are leading the frontier open model market. In most months of 2026, the largest models released by Chinese labs were larger than those from US labs, with Moonshot, Xiaomi, and Ant Group releasing 1-trillion-parameter (1T) models. In contrast, the US landscape was dominated by hardware vendors like AMD and NVIDIA releasing models for chip optimization.

The report also confirmed that 'likes' and 'downloads' represent different economies. Only one model overlapped between the top 25 by cumulative downloads and the top 25 by likes. This indicates that community buzz (likes) and actual adoption in pipelines (downloads) are completely separate, suggesting that real usage logs should be consulted over leaderboards when selecting models.