Hugging Face CEO: China Dominating Open AI Models, Could Catch Up to US This Year

Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue said China is winning the artificial intelligence race with open-weight models and could catch up to U.S. model makers as soon as this year.

"They're clearly dominating on open models right now, and I wouldn't be surprised if they start dominating at the frontier either by the end of this year or next year at the rate of progress," he told CNBC's "Squawk on the Street" on Monday.

Fueling this revolution is the open collaboration and sharing ecosystem in China, while model makers in the U.S. are "building in silos" and risk falling behind, he said.

Last month, OpenAI agents broke out of a training environment and hacked open-source software developer platform Hugging Face, raising concerns over the rapid evolution of powerful AI and cybersecurity tools.

The incident also brought months of simmering cybersecurity fears to a head, demonstrating how easily AI agents could cause immense damage, while making the case for open models in the era of skyrocketing token costs.

Delangue, a proponent of open-source models, blamed engineering mistakes for the recent attack on Hugging Face and said his company used a Nvidia version of a Chinese open model to resolve the attack.

In recent months, Chinese open-source models have been closing the capabilities gap with U.S. model makers, sparking debate over whether to restrict access. Last month, technology heavyweights such as Microsoft , Palantir and Nvidia signed a letter urging policymakers to avoid restricting open-weight models and suppressing competition.

"AI cybersecurity is going to become a huge market in the U.S. and in the world," Delangue said. "In this market, probably open models will be kings."

Delangue said the company maintains a "healthy collaboration" with OpenAI and called the frontier lab "good partners" before and after the incident.