Open Source · Alibaba · GitHub · China · OpenAI · Anthropic · Rest of World
The open-source AI services vying to become China’s Hugging Face
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For Beijing, managing AI requires walking a razor’s edge: seal off domestic internet users from foreign influence, but keep China’s top developers linked to the global cutting edge.
Key facts
- ModelScope said in March that it had 170,000 models and 250 million users
- When Chinese regulators blocked U.S.-based open-source hub Hugging Face in 2023, it opened a market for domestic alternatives, even as the government quietly tolerates artificial intelligence labs
- But the number of models on the two Chinese platforms still fall far behind Hugging Face, which hosts more than 3 million open models
- The Chinese AI industry has faced a shortage of computing power as the U.S. has banned sales of top AI chips to China
Summary
Beijing tolerates VPN workarounds on U.S. open-source platforms like Hugging Face because total isolation would starve its domestic AI industry of global connections. Chinese platforms like MoArk and ModelScope offer domestic open-source models to run natively on Chinese chips. Fears that Washington could ban Chinese models from Hugging Face are accelerating the drive to build a fully sovereign tech stack. When Chinese regulators blocked U.S.-based open-source hub Hugging Face in 2023, it opened a market for domestic alternatives, even as the government quietly tolerates artificial intelligence labs bypassing the block to share Chinese models with the world.