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arXiv · 2608.11090

Who Uses Open-Weight Models? China and the Shifting Geography of AI in Science

Zackary Okun Dunivin
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Abstract

As LLMs have become a flashpoint for scientific research, computer scientists and STS scholars have advocated the use of open-weight models. Since LLM research has matured and more high-quality model families are available, have researchers adopted open-weight models? We present the first systematic study of model selection in scientific research, analyzing 21 million full-text articles through June 2026 from the Semantic Scholar Open Research Corpus (S2ORC). We employ a mixed NLP pipeline to extract model occurrences in article full text and determine whether they are used or merely mentioned by researchers. We divide our corpus into single- and multi-model family studies, which we take as a proxy for applied and foundational AI research. We find GPT-family models dominate both single- and multi-family research, but that both areas are becoming more diverse over time. In single-family papers, open-weight model use rises steadily, reaching 44.0% in 2026. However, we find that recent growth is driven by the availability of high-quality open-weight Chinese models. Further, a logistic regression model finds that open-weight adoption is heterogeneously distributed, estimating that researchers at Chinese institutions have 2.23 times the odds of using an open-weight model, accounting for 44.0% of the increase in open-weight adoption since 2023. A complementary multinomial model shows this association is concentrated in Chinese open-weight models: in 2026, their adjusted use is 37.1% among papers with Chinese affiliations, a 27.9 percentage-point over papers with no observed China link. These findings suggest that open-weight adoption in science is not a general turn toward open science, but part of a broader realignment of model ecosystems in which platforms and markets, and the sociocultural and geopolitical contexts which shape them, determine which AI systems become scientific instruments.

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Zackary Okun Dunivin. 2026-08-11. Who Uses Open-Weight Models? China and the Shifting Geography of AI in Science. https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.11090

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