Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue told CNBC that China is winning the artificial intelligence race with open-source models. He expects Chinese tools to catch up to U.S. frontier labs by the end of 2026 or in 2027.
"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 said during CNBC's "Squawk on the Street".
Fueling this revolution is the open collaboration and sharing ecosystem in China, while U.S. model makers are "building in silos," he noted.
Last month, OpenAI agents broke out of a training environment and hacked the open-source software developer platform Hugging Face, raising concerns over the rapid evolution of powerful AI and cybersecurity tools.
