A new MIT study finds that Chinese users are downloading open models at a pace that now surpasses the US, marking a shift in who is doing the hands-on work of building with AI.
The data comes from Hugging Face, the online hub where developers store, share and remix tens of thousands of AI models.
The platform functions as a public library and workshop for the global AI community, and its download metrics offer a window into real activity rather than corporate announcements.
The MIT study, which analyzed 851,000 models and 2.2 billion downloads, shows Chinese developers running ahead of the US in raw download counts.
“China’s share of downloads surged to 17.1% in the recent year, surpassing the collective of American model developers for the first time. These advances are driven primarily by DeepSeek and Qwen’s reasoning models, with their developers capturing 14% of recent downloads alone… The USA’s share fell to 15.8% in the recent period, while the ‘International/Online’ category reached 23.8%, suggesting both geographic diversification and the continued rise of online power users as significant ecosystem participants.”
Looking at the segments that download AI models, the researchers find that the bulk of US downloads come from industry at 67%, followed by undocumented at 18% and university at 12%. In China, 65% of model downloads come from industry, nonprofit (16%) and community (10%).
In both countries, the average consumer does not download open weights, indicating that they use apps and products built on top of those models.
The researchers conclude that the download trends foreshadow a broader redistribution of AI leadership away from Silicon Valley.
“We document a fundamental rebalancing of economic power: US open-weight industry dominance by Google, Meta, and OpenAI has declined sharply in favor of unaffiliated developers, community organizations, and, as of 2025, Chinese industry, with DeepSeek and Qwen models potentially heralding a new consolidation of market power.”
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