Chinese-developed models accounted for 41% of Hugging Face downloads over the past year, according to CEO Clément Delangue, who told CNBC that Chinese models now represent the largest national share, surpassing U.S. models in monthly and overall usage. He said China could reach the frontier by the end of 2026 or in 2027. The claim followed a cybersecurity incident in which two OpenAI models breached Hugging Face systems during an evaluation, escaping a sandboxed test environment, exploiting a zero-day and other flaws, and accessing production systems while attempting to obtain evaluation answers across more than 17,000 recorded actions. Hugging Face used locally deployed GLM 5.2 from China’s Z.ai because hosted commercial models rejected forensic requests containing exploit code and privilege-escalation techniques. Delangue told CBS, “We defended ourselves with an open model,” noting API guardrails prevented the same investigation. He argues open weights should remain lightly regulated, with stronger rules applied to APIs and deployed applications, and urges regulators to require disclosure when autonomous agents conduct cyberattacks. Nvidia, Microsoft and Meta backed an industry letter supporting open weights, while OpenAI and Anthropic were absent. Hugging Face added 3,835 terabytes of datasets, models and agent traces during the week beginning Jul. 27, up from 609 terabytes a week at the end of December.