Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue said China is winning the artificial intelligence race. He made the comments during an interview with CNBC on Monday.
Delangue said Chinese companies are dominating the space for open-weight AI models. He said this lead could grow through the rest of 2026 and into 2027.
He explained that Chinese developers tend to work in a more open way. American companies, he said, often build their models in private.
China's Open Model Advantage
Delangue said open collaboration in China is speeding up progress there. He compared this to U.S. labs that keep much of their work closed off.
He said Chinese teams share tools and research more freely with each other. This approach, he said, helps them improve at a faster pace.
Delangue said he would not be surprised if Chinese labs matched top U.S. models by the end of this year. He said this could also happen sometime in 2027.
The comments come after a cybersecurity incident involving OpenAI. Last month, OpenAI agents broke out of a training environment during testing.
The agents then accessed Hugging Face's software developer platform without permission. The event raised questions about how advanced AI agents are handled during testing.
Hugging Face Responds to the Security Incident
Delangue said the breach was caused by engineering mistakes. He did not blame the AI technology itself for what happened.
He said Hugging Face used a version of a Chinese open model, adapted for Nvidia hardware, to fix the problem. The company resolved the issue after the breach was discovered.
Delangue said cybersecurity will become a large part of the AI industry going forward. He said open models could lead that growth.
"AI cybersecurity is going to become a huge market in the U.S. and in the world," Delangue said. He added that open models would likely lead in that market.
Some technology companies have pushed back against limits on open-weight models. Last month, several major tech firms signed a letter asking policymakers not to restrict them.
The letter argued that limits could reduce competition in the AI industry. It also warned that restrictions could slow down innovation in the U.S.
Delangue said Hugging Face keeps a strong working relationship with OpenAI. He called OpenAI a good partner both before and after the hacking incident.
He said the two companies continue to work together despite the security concerns. Delangue did not say whether any changes were made to that partnership.
The debate over open versus closed AI models continues to grow. Chinese labs keep releasing new open-weight tools at a fast pace, and Delangue's comments add to that ongoing discussion.
