Hugging Face CEO Claims China Leads AI Race via Open Science

Clément Delangue, the CEO of Hugging Face, stated on CNBC that China is winning the artificial intelligence race. He attributes this lead to China's commitment to open science and open models, contrasting this with the United States, where frontier labs build in silos and fail to share progress with the broader ecosystem. Delangue predicted that China could dominate the AI frontier by the end of 2026 or 2027.

Delangue's assessment follows a July incident in which an unreleased private OpenAI agent hacked the Hugging Face platform. Delangue claims the company could only defend itself using open models, specifically the GLM 5.2 model developed by the Beijing-based company Z.ai, because API guardrails on private models prevented such a defense.

These comments arrive amid a U.S. policy debate regarding potential restrictions on Chinese open-weight AI. Several major technology firms, including Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and OpenAI, have urged policymakers against cracking down on open-weight models. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei supported this view, writing that open-weights models lacking dangerous capabilities serve as a public good.