State of Open Source on Hugging Face: Spring 2026

Back to Articles State of Open Source on Hugging Face: Spring 2026 Team Article Published March 17, 2026 Upvote 53 +47 Avijit Ghosh evijit Follow huggingface Lucie-Aimée Kaffee frimelle Follow huggingface Yacine Jernite yjernite Follow huggingface Irene Solaiman irenesolaiman Follow huggingface This post examines how the open source AI landscape has shifted across competition, geography, technical trends, and emerging communities over the past year. We primarily examine community activity on Hugging Face across many types of metrics to give a holistic view of the ecosystem.  This post builds on an earlier analysis conducted mid-2025, available here, which examined what the Hugging Face Community is building. We recommend reading additional perspectives on the open source ecosystem in and outside of Hugging Face from the Data Provenance Initiative, Interconnects, OpenRouter and a16z, and MIT and the Linux Foundation. As the Hugging Face ecosystem is distributed, analyses are a combination of Hugging Face and community members' work, each of which is appropriately credited. Activity in the open source AI ecosystem has rapidly grown, with the number of users, model, and dataset repositories all close to doubling. In 2025, Hugging Face grew to 13 million users, more than 2 million public models, and over 500,000 public datasets. This growth signals more than increased interest in open source; it reflects a shift toward active participation, with users increasingly creating der...