State of Open Models: Summer 2026 Observations

Public model repositories on Hugging Face grew from 2.43 M to 2.96 M, datasets from 711 k to 1 M, and Spaces from 1.00 M to 1.44 M. 85.6% of models have under 200 lifetime downloads, while 1.5% of repos generate 99.2% of all downloads. In 2026 Chinese labs released the largest open models (754 B–2.78 T parameters), surpassing U.S. releases limited to NVIDIA’s Nemotron 3 Ultra (561 B) and Thinking Machines’ Inkling (952 B). AMD and NVIDIA added over 200 open-model repositories each, showcasing hardware compatibility; U.S. models above 100 B parameters often relied on Chinese foundations.