China's open-weight models now pull 80% of OpenRouter traffic as America falls behind
The current balance of power in open models
Chinese labs have led open-weight models since April 2025, and the gap is widening. On Hugging Face, China's cumulative downloads have reached 3.2B — twice America's total. On the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, the top US open model trails 15 Chinese ones. OpenRouter shows Chinese models growing from ~70% to over 80% of usage, and Qwen now appears in 30% of arXiv ML papers versus Llama's 21%.
If an attempt was made to restrict access to the strongest open-weight models from China because they amplify risks, the parties who would be set back are American businesses.
- Zaraif13
It's becoming more clear that for big enterprises to really adopt AI, they need to use open models. Especially if they want to own their own intelligence, which they should.
I spent the last 2 days building basic AI agents to automate some mundane supply chain workflows for a large company. Those seemingly boring workflows had bank statements, supplier IDs and other sensitive information.
For me it was all alarm bells, there is no way they can afford to give closed models access to this data. I was compelled to figure out an open model based solution for them, which made me realize that this is probably the only way for enterprises going forward.
- silverFork
Impressive you know. They are a few months behind but still the world uses their models. Bet you because the users suspect that Americans will pull the rug from under them. Few months behind versus being left behind forever. Would have been nice to know the differences in spending between the models but I suspect the data is impossible to collect.
- est
The open-weight vs. closed model is wrong comparison, I suggest we call them local-installable models and cloud-only models.
Some open-weight models aren't so open in their license.
- JSR_FDED
I’m super uncomfortable with the idea of a single company or country holding all the cards when it comes to AI. So from that perspective I welcome the Chinese models.
Additionally, the big labs’ formulation of AI as a US-vs-China national security issue is very convenient for keeping those pesky regulations at bay, and for ensuring the AI financial bubble doesn’t pop before everyone can unload in an IPO first. Both of these offend my sense of fair play.
The Chinese labs aren’t just putting models out there, they’re publishing and sharing their research and innovation too. That’s just a better way of doing science and contributing to the development of the whole field.
- tamaker
Really important work here. Really glad it's being shared a) with US Leadership and b) with the community.