Family share within OSS-routed traffic, Nov 2025 - Apr 2026
Family share within OSS-routed traffic, Nov 2025 - Apr 2026
Which open-weight AI model is most popular in 2026? On the Requesty gateway, OSS-routed traffic went from Qwen-dominated in late 2025 (34-38% share in Nov-Dec) to DeepSeek-dominated in January 2026 (77% after the R1 launch), and back to a genuinely diversified state by April (DeepSeek 47%, Kimi 17%, MiniMax 15%). Qwen collapsed from 38% to under 4% almost overnight when DeepSeek R1 shipped.
Why it mattersOpen-source LLM leadership rotates on a months-not-years timescale: the "best open model" changes with each new release, and the long tail diversifies fast once any single model loses its lead. For teams hard-coding OSS choices into prompts or routing rules, that means yesterday's default is often already wrong. Kimi K2 quintupling in three months is the clearest current example.
Key findings
- 01Qwen (Alibaba): 34% in Nov, 38% in Dec, then collapsed to under 4% from January onward. DeepSeek R1 launch killed Qwen share overnight.
- 02DeepSeek: 10% in Nov, exploded to 77% in Jan (R1 launch), declining since to 47% in Apr.
- 03Kimi (Moonshot): volatile. 10% Nov, 16% Dec, collapsed to 2% Jan, back to 17% Apr.
- 04MiniMax: 14% Nov, near-zero Dec, recovered to 15% by Apr.
- 05The OSS tier went from concentrated (one family >33%) to diversified (no family >47%) in six months.
Data
| Month | DeepSeek(percent) | MiniMax(percent) | Kimi (Moonshot)(percent) | Mistral(percent) | GLM (Zhipu)(percent) | Qwen (Alibaba)(percent) | Llama (Meta)(percent) | GPT-OSS (OpenAI)(percent) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| November | 10.29% | 13.59% | 9.64% | 8.66% | 14.01% | 33.64% | 2.51% | 7.64% |
| December | 17.43% | 0.48% | 15.82% | 13.59% | 7.49% | 37.55% | 2.11% | 5.44% |
| January | 76.70% | 6.39% | 1.73% | 6.47% | 3.17% | 3.85% | 0.68% | 1.02% |
| February | 63.75% | 5.39% | 7.03% | 11.89% | 6.39% | 3.38% | 1.00% | 1.19% |
| March | 65.17% | 13.96% | 4.39% | 4.99% | 7.52% | 1.61% | 1.57% | 0.80% |
| April | 46.68% | 14.58% | 16.75% | 9.65% | 6.71% | 1.72% | 3.01% | 0.90% |