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 Qwen family 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 at 4%. Cumulative tracked downloads across the three regions reached 2.04 billion through March 2026.The verification gap extends to scan coverage. Cisco Foundation AI scans every public file uploaded to Hugging Face through an updated ClamAV engine, and the platform surfaces a file-level badge per file. Hugging Face’s own malware scanning documentation notes a file with neither an ok nor an infected badge may be queued, still scanning, or errored. At a given review point, a repository may contain files without completed scan results. Coverage has been an assumption, not an attribute anyone could read before approving a model.From command line to public lookupCisco on Thursday published the AI Supply Chain Provenance Explorer, a free public database covering almost 900 open models. Each entry can carry provider headquarters, a fingerprinted lineage graph, license restrictions, and a files-scanned count. The tool extends Cisco’s Model Provenance Kit, an open-source Python toolkit released in April that fingerprinted roughly 150 base models across 45+ families and 20+ publishers. Coverage grew roughly sixfold in a quarter.The April release was a command-line tool. Running it meant a local Python environment, downloading model weights that run into tens of gigabytes, and dedicating engineer hours per model. The Explorer queries results Cisco already computed. On Thursday, verifying parentage starts with a search bar, and cost is why enterprises run open weights in the first place.Amy Chang, head of AI Threat Intelligence and Security Research at Cisco, has been building the case for why verification gaps matter. During a VB Transform 2026 agentic security panel, Chang presented findings from 6,986 multi-turn attacks against 15 flagship models, with success rates reaching 88.3%. "If you don’t understand how models are susceptible to different types of attacks, then you are unable to account for how that model that is powering your agent, that is powering your application, to understand where those failure points are," Chang told the audience. Understanding failure points starts with knowing which model you are running.The Explorer also surfaces data Cisco already uses operationally. The company’s Cerberus system inspects models entering Hugging Face and feeds Secure Access policies that block by risky license or region of origin. The Explorer makes that class of information free and searchable without a Cisco product.How fingerprinting replaces the tagThe Explorer grounds model relationships in similarity scores rather than self-reported metadata. Cisco’s Model Provenance Kit works in two scored stages. Stage one compares architecture metadata before loading any weights. When metadata is ambiguous, stage two extracts five weight-level signals. Embedding Anchor Similarity captures geometric relationships that survive fine-tuning. Embedding Norm Distribution encodes word frequency patterns. Norm Layer Fingerprint reads layers stable across fine-tuning. Layer Energy Profile compares distributions across network depth. Weig