China's open-weight models now pull 80% of OpenRouter traffic as America falls behind
The current balance of power in open models
Chinese labs have led open-weight models since April 2025, and the gap is widening. On Hugging Face, China's cumulative downloads have reached 3.2B — twice America's total. On the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, the top US open model trails 15 Chinese ones. OpenRouter shows Chinese models growing from ~70% to over 80% of usage, and Qwen now appears in 30% of arXiv ML papers versus Llama's 21%.
If an attempt was made to restrict access to the strongest open-weight models from China because they amplify risks, the parties who would be set back are American businesses.