GoKawiilHugging 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.