The current balance of power in open models
Interconnects Nathan Lambert ● Covered by 2 sources
Open-weight AI models from Chinese companies have taken the lead over American open-weight models across downloads and public benchmarks, while influencing adoption in research and commercial use. Hugging Face downloads show China’s lead growing to about 1.6B additional downloads (about 3.2B total) after the ATOM Project began tracking in August 2025. The ecosystem responds with more US-based investment focused on open models and more cross-border enterprise agreements, since restricting access would mainly disadvantage American businesses.
Why it matters
The expanded form of a testimony I prepared for Congress.