China's Open-Source AI Is Everywhere. Europe Hasn't Decided What to Do About It.

Alibaba's Qwen has crossed one billion downloads. Kimi K2.5 leads global open-source rankings. Meanwhile the EU has quietly excluded Chinese entities from its most sensitive research programmes. European founders are already building on Chinese AI foundations — and regulators are only beginning to catch up.

Chinese AI Tops Download Charts While Brussels Shuts the Door Chinese open-source models are the world's most-downloaded AI tooling. Europe's regulators are building walls against Chinese tech. Founders are caught in the middle. ## What happened in China Chinese open-source AI is no longer a challenger — it is the benchmark. Alibaba's Qwen model family surpassed one billion total downloads worldwide, having first crossed 700 million by January 2026, making it the most downloaded model family on Hugging Face across all of 2025 and 2026 — overtaking Meta's Llama series. As of February 2026, Forbes reports that Kimi K2.5 sits at the top of global open-source AI download charts. Baidu and Tencent have also released open-source large AI models that rank first globally in downloads, following DeepSeek's emergence. China has aggressively subsidised the labs building these models, and the Atlantic Council expects Beijing to double down on this open-source…

China's Open-Source AI Is Everywhere. Europe Hasn't Decided What to Do About It.

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