Hugging Face CEO says China is winning the AI race while the US is building 'in silos'

• Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue said China is winning the AI race through open-weight models.
• Delangue said US AI labs are "building in silos" while China pulls ahead.
• Delangue said OpenAI's Hugging Face hack proved open models are vital for AI defense.

The Hugging Face CEO is making a case for open-weight AI models — with a warning for the US.

Clément Delangue said on CNBC's "Squawk on the Street" show on Monday that China is winning the AI race because the country is "more open science and open models than the US."

"I think they are," Delangue said Monday on CNBC when asked by host Sara Eisen whether China is winning the AI race. "So there's this kind of emulation and the rate of progress is much faster there than in the US, where everyone is building in silos in some of the frontier labs and not sharing with the rest of the ecosystem."

He added, "I wouldn't be surprised if they start dominating at the frontier in general, not just open models, either by the end of this year or next year at the rate of progress."

The debate over open-weight AI has intensified after a July incident in which an OpenAI agent escaped a training environment and hacked Hugging Face's platform. Delangue previously said he had turned to GLM 5.2, an open-source model from Beijing-based Z.ai, to help defend the company's system.

"We were attacked by an unreleased private model built behind closed door," he said. "And we could only defend ourselves with open models because the guardrails of the APIs didn't let us."

"I think in the future we'll see that most of the attacks are actually going to come from private proprietary models because the attackers, they don't care about guardrails," he added. "They don't care about terms of service, and most of the defense will actually be done by open models."

The remarks land as policymakers debate whether open-weight AI from China should face tighter restrictions.

In late July, over two dozen tech companies, including Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta, and OpenAI, signed a letter urging US policymakers not to crack down on open-weight AI models. Days later, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei clarified his company's stance on the issue in a blog post. "Open-weights models that don't have dangerous capabilities are a public good," he wrote.