Hugging Face CEO Warns U.S. AI Industry Will Suffer If Closed-Source Adoption Continues

The race for artificial intelligence supremacy sees the United States in the lead, yet China is reportedly gaining an advantage through its commitment to developing an open-source AI ecosystem. This initiative promotes the creation of models that are freely available, fostering innovation and collaboration across borders.

Open-Source AI in the U. S.: Challenges and Opportunities

The ongoing discourse about whether the U. S.should embrace open-source strategies for its AI development remains critical. Notably, one goal of former President Trump’s AI Action Plan was to encourage broad access to large language models (LLMs).Despite this, major AI corporations seem hesitant to transition to an open-source framework. Hugging Face’s CEO, Clement Delangue, emphasized this on social media, suggesting that the lack of collaborative efforts in sharing AI research puts the U. S.at a disadvantage, especially compared to nations like China.

A Chinese food delivery company contributes more to advancing AI than US Big Tech thanks to open science and open-source AI 🤯🤯🤯The US is cooked if AI scientists don’t fight their management to get back to our roots of sharing science rather than keeping it secret and just… https://t.co/8iWP06yZ7x

— clem 🤗 (@ClementDelangue) September 2, 2025

Delangue’s remarks are particularly relevant in light of a recent advancement by the Chinese food delivery giant, Meituan, which unveiled an innovative mixture of experts (MoE) model boasting 560 billion parameters. This model is designed to enhance automation in services such as customer support and plays a pivotal role in the burgeoning open-source AI trend in China. Delangue’s insistence on the necessity for U. S.firms to advocate for transparency and open scientific discourse reflects a critical perspective on the state of AI development in America.

Will DeepSeek's integrity be questioned with the newest scandal? — Image credits: Reuters / Dado Ruvic

One of the underlying reasons for the U. S.’s preference for a closed-source approach is the significant capital being funneled into AI training and inference. Companies like OpenAI and Anthropic generate revenue through private subscriptions and API services associated with proprietary models. With AI emerging as a lucrative industry in the West, firms such as Gemini prioritize safeguarding their LLMs to maintain a competitive edge, resulting in a dilemma of secrecy versus collaboration.

While the benefits of open-source models are numerous, one pivotal takeaway is the fact that China has been at the forefront of cultivating an open-source AI landscape for several years. Despite OpenAI’s recent strides towards developing open-source LLMs with initiatives like gpt-oss, there remains an urgent need for the U. S.AI sector to reevaluate its current strategy and align more closely with collaborative open-source principles.

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