Chinese models are now 41% of Hugging Face downloads. They passed the US. Clem Delangue @ClemDelangue, CEO of the main open model platform, …

Chinese models are now 41% of Hugging Face downloads. They passed the US. Clem Delangue @ClemDelangue, CEO of the main open model platform, cites Hugging Face's own Spring 2026 report: Chinese open weights lead monthly and overall downloads. His harder claim is that open source is the accelerant behind AI leadership, so if China keeps leading open source, it could lead AI overall within a year or two. Peter Diamandis @PeterDiamandis has walked through the same China-catching-up dynamic on his show, pointing at GLM matching Western frontier benchmarks. For US frontier labs, this is a moat-erosion signal. For any US enterprise standardizing on Chinese open weights, it is a sovereignty question that has not been priced. The full argument on why open source decides the AI race: https://podcastalpha.substack.com/p/tec-delangue-20260710 Source: Equity by TechCrunch - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqdEHMJFlSI Media

The idea of sovereign frontier models is only viable as long as the main Chinese model makers keep shipping open weights models that anyone …

Source: Clem Delangue (X) | 2026-07-14

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