The lineage behind 69% of open models was never verified. Cisco just fingerprinted almost 900 for free
A security team approving an open-source model for production today starts with a repository page. The page lists the model name, the license, and a tag identifying the base model it descended from. That tag is a string the uploader typed. Hugging Face does not require uploaders to substantiate the claim through weight-level analysis.
The ATOM Report, published by Nathan Lambert and Florian Brand at Interconnects AI in April 2026, tracked roughly 1,500 mainline open models. ATOM identifies derivatives through the Hugging Face base_model tag, a field the uploader populates, filtering to models whose base model appears in the tracked list and that have more than five lifetime downloads and excluding GGUF and MLX re-uploads. By that measure, Alibaba’s Qwenfamily is the declared parent of 69% of new open-model derivatives as of February 2026, up from 1% in January 2024. Chinese labs overall account for 70%. Europe sits...
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