OpenAI, Google and Anthropic SDKs Made Up 89.9% of AI Model SDK Downloads in 2026, With No Single Provider Above 43%

Summary

Picture a real estate agent who installs a chat widget on her site and a listing-summary tool in her CRM. Both are AI apps, and each one is built on a model from a specific provider, chosen by a developer she will never meet.

Developers connect their apps to those models through official software development kits, or SDKs. The Python SDKs for the major providers are public on the Python Package Index, so download counts give a rough who-uses-what view of which AI engines sit behind the apps that read and summarize the web.

In the Q3 2026 sample days, seven provider SDKs were downloaded 617,853,609 times. Three providers, OpenAI, Google and Anthropic, accounted for 89.9%. Two years earlier one SDK alone held 77.1%, so the field has become more evenly split.

What we measured

We queried the public PyPI download log in Google BigQuery (bigquery-public-data.pypi.file_downloads), which records one row for every file downloaded from the Python Package Index. To keep the query affordable we sampled the first seven days of every month from January 2022 through September 2026, 399 days in total, and summed downloads by month, package, country, CI flag, installer and weekday versus weekend into one working table. A quarter in this study therefore means 21 sampled days (days 1 to 7 of each of its three months), not a full quarter. We removed downloads made by mirroring and proxy tools (bandersnatch, Nexus, Artifactory, devpi), which copy packages in bulk rather than install them. To control for the growth of PyPI itself we also pulled total daily download counts for the whole index from the table's partition metadata for the same sampled days.

We counted official Python SDKs from six AI model providers: openai, google-genai and google-generativeai (both Google), anthropic, mistralai, cohere and groq. Shares are download shares only. They do not measure usage volume, revenue or model quality, and many apps install more than one SDK.

Three providers account for 89.9% of downloads

Download totals for the 21 sampled days of Q3 2026, grouped by provider.

Google's total combines its newer google-genai SDK (164,951,237) and the older google-generativeai package (9,317,002).

Downloads are spread across more providers than two years ago

Download share by provider at five points in time.

Every provider in the list grew in raw downloads over the period. Shifts in share come from some SDKs growing faster than others. The lead also changed hands: Google's two SDKs had the largest share in Q3 2025 (42.9%) and Q1 2026 (49.0%), and OpenAI's SDK led again in Q3 2026. Across all seven SDKs, downloads grew 21.9x between the Q3 2024 and Q3 2026 sample days.

SDK downloads grew faster than Python itself

Total SDK downloads per quarter (21 sampled days).

In Q3 2022 these SDKs had 159,567 sampled downloads. In Q3 2026 they had 617,853,609. 40.6% of Q3 2026 downloads were CI-flagged, and United States IP addresses accounted for 79.1%, which mostly reflects cloud server locations.

What this means

Customers reach your business through apps built on several different AI models, not one. Each model may read and describe your site a little differently, so checking only one assistant gives an incomplete picture. Consistent facts across your website, Google Business Profile and major directories help every model land on the same, correct description. Keeping those facts in sync is plain, steady work, and it is most of what AI SEO services should handle month to month.

To see how your business shows up across several AI assistants at once, including Google, start with a free AI visibility audit; it covers SEO for AI Overviews and the chat tools in one report.

Limits

A download is not a user. One developer, one Docker build or one CI job can download the same package many times, and a single busy pipeline can move a package's numbers sharply from month to month.

Figures cover the first seven days of each month only (21 days per quarter), so they are sample totals, not full-month or full-quarter totals. Growth rates compare like-for-like sample periods.

PyPI as a whole grew from 12.1 billion downloads in the Q3 2022 sample days to 115.0 billion in the Q3 2026 sample days (9.5x), so part of every package's growth is the index growing. We report share of all PyPI downloads where it matters.

PyPI-wide downloads in the September 2026 sample week were 38.1% lower than in the August 2026 sample week (28.7 billion vs 46.4 billion), so September figures for individual packages should be read with that drop in mind.

The CI flag is only populated in this dataset from March 2024, and it only catches environments that announce themselves as CI. Automated downloads that do not set a CI variable are counted as non-CI.

Country codes come from the downloading IP address. Cloud servers sit mostly in the United States, so country splits describe where machines run, not where developers live.

Download share is not market share. One app may make millions of model calls after a single SDK download, and some providers' models are also reached through other SDKs or plain HTTP.

Some apps install several provider SDKs at once, and some tools install SDKs as dependencies, which lifts their counts.

Frequently asked questions

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