State of Open Models: Summer 2026 Observations

▤ Summary

This article reviews the state of open models on the Hugging Face Hub in 2026 and shows rapid growth in models, datasets, and Spaces. It explains how Chinese frontier labs, U.S. hardware vendors, and community tooling such as llama.cpp and GGUF shape model adoption and deployment. It highlights that small models still drive most downloads, while large frontier models dominate attention and likes. It also shows how Qwen has become a major foundation for downstream derivatives and how agent traffic is becoming an important new usage signal on the Hub.

▦ Linked Companies

Z.ai

$50M to $100M