Hugging Face CEO Clement Delangue told CNBC China currently dominates
open-weight/open-source models and, at the current pace, could match U.S. model
developers in frontier models by year-end or early next year. He attributed the
gap to China’s collaborative, open ecosystem versus U.S. firms operating
independently, which he said risks U.S. lag. On last month’s OpenAI agent breach
of Hugging Face’s training environment, Delangue blamed an engineering error and
said his firm used Chinese open-source models to mitigate the incident.
