Open Models Outpace Closed Ones in AI Adoption

The AI industry has shifted focus from frontier models to open-source alternatives, as developers increasingly favor cheaper, customizable models. Chinese open-weight models accounted for 41% of downloads on Hugging Face this spring, surpassing U.S. models. On OpenRouter, the top six most popular models are all open models from Chinese firms, including Tencent, Xiaomi, DeepSeek, MiniMax, and Z.ai. Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.7 trails in seventh place, at the time of this writing. Data from Vercel shows that open-weight models are absorbing much of the volume-heavy infrastructure of AI apps, while closed models operate as the higher-cost, premium layer. Open models handled nearly a third of AI requests on the platform in June.

Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue highlighted the growing trend of companies preferring to own their AI models rather than rent them. He noted that Hugging Face’s customers and community members are increasingly touting the benefits of owning their own AI models rather than renting them, a trend that’s picked up steam in the cold light of day after getting the bill associated with the cost of scaling closed frontier models. “If you’re an AI company or a technology company, you don’t want to outsource your core capabilities to another company, to a black box API that you don’t control, don’t have any visibility on, and don’t really have any sort of ownership,” Delangue said. This shift is reflected in the activity on Hugging Face, where a new repository is created every seven seconds, hosting almost three million public models and one million public datasets.

The rise of open models coincides with a steady stream of increasingly capable releases from Chinese AI labs. Every few months, another Chinese AI company releases a powerful open-weight model that is cheaper to deploy and easier to customize than closed competitors, undercutting the economics of proprietary AI that U.S. firms have poured billions into. Most recently, Beijing-based AI company Z.ai released an open-weight model called GLM-5.2 that excels at agentic coding and competes with Anthropic’s latest models on identifying security vulnerabilities.

Source: techcrunch