State of Open Source on Hugging Face: Spring 2026

Summary

The post examines how open source AI on Hugging Face changed over the past year across competition, geography, technical trends, and emerging communities. It combines Hugging Face and community-contributed metrics to assess users, models, datasets, downloads, repositories, and specialized sub-ecosystems. In 2025, the platform reached 13 million users, more than 2 million public models, and over 500,000 public datasets, while the top 200 models represented 49.6% of downloads and China surpassed the U.S. in monthly and overall downloads. The analysis also describes rising participation by independent developers, increased Chinese releases, and active communities in robotics and science, framing open source AI as overlapping ecosystems rather than a uniform market.

Takeaways

1. 1

   Hugging Face reached 13 million users, more than 2 million public models, and over 500,000 public datasets in 2025, with users increasingly creating derivatives such as fine-tuned models, adapters, benchmarks, and applications.

2. 2

   Open source AI activity is highly concentrated: approximately half of Hugging Face models have fewer than 200 downloads, while the 200 most-downloaded models account for 49.6% of all downloads.

3. 3

   China surpassed the U.S. in monthly and overall downloads, while independent or unaffiliated developers increased their share of downloads from 17% to 39% between the period before 2022 and 2025.