A photo shows the logos of Alibaba and its AI model application Qwen Photo: VCG

　　Chinese AI models are becoming indispensable tools for an increasing number of overseas developers, the country"s industry observers said on Sunday. Despite US" export controls and politically motivated restrictions, Alibaba"s Qwen, DeepSeek, Moonshot AI"s Kimi, Zhipu AI and MiniMax are expanding rapidly in the world, according to experts.

　　Alibaba Group"s open-source AI model Qwen has reportedly surpassed 3 billion downloads worldwide during the past six months, overtaking Meta and Google to claim the top spot globally, according to an August 14 report from open-source platform Hugging Face.

　　The Hugging Face report showed that Google"s open models had 418 million downloads, and Meta"s had 227 million on the platform in the same period.

　　These figures highlight the accelerating adoption of Chinese open-source and open-weight models, despite US" export control measures, Tian Feng, former dean of SenseTime"s Intelligence Industry Research Institute, told the Global Times on Sunday.

　　According to the Qwen team, Alibaba has open-sourced more than 460 models through the Qwen family, and the derivative models built on top of them now exceed 300,000.

　　In its report, Hugging Face described Qwen as "one of the largest foundations of the open AI ecosystem," noting that "Qwen has become embedded in the default workflow of developers deciding which model to fine-tune and deploy."

　　Open-weight models can be downloaded, fine-tuned and used as the foundation for building new AI products. Their adoption has become an important indicator of which technologies global developers prefer when selecting a base model.