Lambert testimony: Chinese open-weight downloads 2x US, 80% of OpenRouter open traffic

khiladi1729 · reddit · 2026-09-23

Nathan Lambert published the written version of his Congressional testimony on open models, with striking numbers: 3.2B Hugging Face downloads of Chinese open-weight models vs 1.6B American since Aug 2025; OpenRouter open-model traffic grew from 1T to 80T tokens/week in a year, with Chinese models over 80%; Chinese open weights trail the closed frontier by 2-5 months vs 6-9 for American ones. The gap is smallest in agentic coding, where Qwen, GLM and Kimi are now the default local choices for tool-use work.

Related event: Nathan Lambert briefs US Congress on open models and China competition(7 posts)→

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