For several weeks this summer, the AI industry was fixated on Anthropic’s latest frontier models and Washington’s fight to control who was granted access to them. But while everyone was watching the frontier, developers kept building — and they weren’t waiting around for permission from the Anthropics and OpenAIs of the world.
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. And 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.