A half-year report from a State Council Information Office press conference directly measured the weight of China's open-source ecosystem. At 10:00 a.m. on July 20, the State Council Information Office held a press conference, with Wang Weiming, chief engineer of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, Tao Qing, director of the Department of Operation Monitoring and Coordination, and Xie Cun, director of the Bureau of Information and Communications, attending together to introduce the development situation of industry and information technology in the first half of 2026 and answer journalists' questions. At this press conference, a set of figures given by Tao Qing allowed the outside world to clearly see the realistic outline of the simultaneous efforts of basic software, industrial software, and the open-source ecosystem.

First, there is a stable foundation. From January to May this year, China's software business income exceeded 6.2 trillion yuan, an increase of 10.3% year-on-year, continuing the trend of steady growth. Under this foundation, the software industry has shown four clear development trends this year.

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The first trend is the accelerated development of basic software. Basic software such as operating systems and databases continues to break through, with a series of innovative achievements emerging one after another. The open-source HarmonyOS operating system has fully covered terminal devices such as smartphones, computers, cars, and home appliances, with more than 1.35 billion ecological devices. Over 100 industry distribution versions based on the open-source HarmonyOS, such as E-Hong and Yi-Hong, have been launched. A domestic open-source system that once started from scratch has now quietly grown into the body of hundreds of millions of devices.

The second trend is the widespread application of industrial software. Industrial software has formed a product system covering key industries, accelerating deployment and continuous iteration in critical areas, providing power for the digital transformation of various industries. By the end of June this year, the penetration rate of digital R&D design tools in key industrial enterprises reached 86.3%, and the numerical control rate of key processes reached 69.5%. Both rates have stood at high levels simultaneously.

The third trend is the comprehensive empowerment of artificial intelligence. Authorities have guided software companies to seize the opportunities brought by AI industrial transformation, accelerate the use of code large models and intelligent programming tools to improve R&D and production efficiency, making product functions richer, interaction experiences more natural, and content creation more efficient. Innovative applications such as intelligent testing and intelligent operations are also accelerating their implementation.

The fourth trend, which is also the most significant point of this press conference — the rapid expansion of the open-source ecosystem. National-level open-source foundations have already included more than 50 open-source projects in the incubation stage. The national-level artificial intelligence open-source community has gathered over 11 million users and hosted more than 70,000 models. Open-source solutions covering the entire stack, from basic software to large models and applications, are accelerating their construction. Most notably, the global cumulative downloads of China's artificial intelligence open-source large models have exceeded 10 billion times. From lines of open-source code to billions of times being pulled by global developers, the influence of China's large models has been placed on the table in such a concrete way for the first time.