New Delhi, Aug. 7 -- SAN FRANCISCO - When OpenAI's pre-release AI agent breached Hugging Face's infrastructure last month, the machine learning platform did not reach for an American model to investigate. It deployed GLM 5.2, an open-source model built by Z.ai, a Beijing-based lab, because American commercial models refused to do the forensic work. Hugging Face CEO Clement Delangue is now making explicit what that choice implied.

"China is winning the AI race," Delangue said in an interview with CNBC. He placed the cause in how development is structured, not in what any single lab has built. American frontier labs, he argued, are "building in silos in some of the frontier labs and not sharing with the rest of the ecosystem." China, by co...