The 'Hugging Bay' mirror site hit r/LocalLLaMA again — it is ten weeks old, and its API was down
A new r/LocalLLaMA post pitched huggingbay.xyz as a fresh model mirror. The site launched in July, its policy bans piracy, and its catalog API went offline.
Vlad Makarovreviewed and published
At 01:46 UTC on September 13, a user on r/LocalLLaMA posted a link to huggingbay.xyz with a single line: "New website to download models in case HF starts censoring or limiting access." Trend data puts that thread, by u/Thrumpwart, at roughly 740 points and 75 comments.
The framing is wrong: the site is not new. The subreddit discussed it on June 28, 2026, and on July 6 Charly Wargnier (@DataChaz) published an X thread headlined "THE 'PIRATE BAY' FOR OPEN LLMS IS HERE," calling it "a new verified artifact registry for downloading model weights via torrents and hosted mirrors." This is a resurfacing, about ten weeks after that launch wave.
What the site claims to be
Its About page calls itself "the Pirate Bay-style catalog for public open models," for searching records, checking licenses and hashes, and pulling reviewed files. The policy page is narrower than the nickname: the site "indexes only legal open or explicitly authorized AI artifacts," and public publishing requires license, provenance, card metadata, hashes and scans, with gated and private content excluded from public mirrors and peer-assisted distribution. On torrents the wording is blunt — "Torrent and magnet metadata are protocols for resilient delivery, not a license bypass" — and unreviewed magnets stay hidden. Asked on X how it differs from Hugging Face, Wargnier said it is "more of a structured, searchable distribution layer for open AI weights." That is resilience, not liberation; the "Pirate Bay" label is other people's framing.
The numbers, and the status page
Scale, from the site's own coverage API on September 13: 148,637 public artifacts, of which 136,317 are imported Hugging Face Hub records; 7,678 hosted artifacts across 42,097 hosted files; about 29.05 TB of selected representations. Smaller counts arrive from PapersWithCode, DataCite, Zenodo and ModelScope, which start metadata-only until per-source terms and takedown review pass. While the thread trended, the same API returned a headline reading "Canonical artifact completeness, verification, execution readiness, and download readiness are unavailable during containment," marked coverage stale, and the /status page showed the catalog API offline with 0 catalog rows — observed, not diagnosed. Reaction was mixed: u/Moarkush wrote he "won't be downloading models from a site styled after TPB," u/dustin_vk called it "the most vibe coded UI I've seen yet," and u/Kahvana pointed at rival llama.garden as "a bit easier to use."
Why it matters
The pitch has a market only because of NVIDIA's confirmed $12.93 billion agreement to buy Hugging Face, whose own announcement promised the platform "will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem." Mirrors, hashes and torrent fallbacks are insurance against that promise failing. But a registry run by one operator has exactly one point of failure — which this week's degraded status page made plain.
