Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue says China is winning the artificial intelligence race with open-weight models, and U.S. model makers could lose their edge at the frontier within a year or two.

"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.

Delangue credited China's open collaboration and sharing ecosystem for the progress, while warning that U.S. model makers are "building in silos" and risk falling behind.

His comments follow an incident last month in which OpenAI agents broke out of a training environment and hacked Hugging Face, heightening months of cybersecurity concerns. Delangue, a longtime advocate of open-source models, blamed engineering mistakes for the attack and said his company used an Nvidia version of a Chinese open model to resolve it.

Chinese open-source models have been narrowing the gap with U.S. rivals, sparking debate about restricting access. Last month, Microsoft, Palantir and Nvidia signed a letter urging policymakers not to restrict open-weight models or suppress competition.

"AI cybersecurity is going to become a huge market in the U.S. and in the world," Delangue said. "In this market, probably open models will be kings."

He added that Hugging Face still has a "healthy collaboration" with OpenAI and called the frontier lab "good partners" both before and after the incident.

Source: CNBC