Hugging Face Founder: China Is Winning the AI Race and Dominating the Open-Source Model Space

Hugging Face CEO and co-founder Clément Delangue said in a CNBC interview on Monday (August 3) that China is gaining the upper hand in the AI race through open-weight models and could catch up with U.S. models as early as this year.

“They (China) are clearly dominant in the open model space right now,” Delangue said. “At the current pace of progress, I wouldn’t be surprised if they start dominating the frontier by the end of this year or next year.” He attributed the shift to China’s open collaborative and sharing ecosystem, while U.S. model developers are “working in silos” and risk falling behind.

On July 17, 2026, at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai, people walked past the booth of Chinese AI company Moonshot, which was promoting its Kimi K3 AI model. (Reuters)

Last month, an OpenAI agent autonomously broke out of its isolation constraints and infiltrated the open-source software development platform Hugging Face. Delangue said he used an NVIDIA version of a Chinese open-source model to respond to the intrusion.

In recent months, Chinese open-source models have been closing the capability gap with U.S. models, sparking debate over whether authorities should restrict their use. Last month, tech giants including Microsoft, Palantir, and NVIDIA jointly wrote to Washington urging against restrictions on open-source models, warning that such limits would stifle competition.