China’s open-source dominance threatens US AI lead, US advisory body says
The dominance of China’s open-source artificial intelligence is creating a “self-reinforcing competitive advantage”, allowing it to challenge U.S. rivals despite restricted access to advanced AI chips, a U.S. congressional advisory body said on Monday.
Driven by their cheaper cost, Chinese large language models from firms including Alibaba 9988.HK, Moonshot and MiniMax 0100.HK now dominate worldwide usage rankings on platforms like HuggingFace and OpenRouter.
Beijing’s push to deploy AI throughout a wide range of sectors to upgrade its manufacturing base, factories, logistics networks and robotics is generating real-world data that feeds back into model improvement, the report said.
“This open ecosystem enables China to innovate close to the frontier despite significant compute constraints,” the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission wrote in a report published on Monday.
“Chinese labs have narrowed performance gaps with top Western large language models,” it added.
U.S. lawmakers have imposed successive rounds of export restrictions on China since 2022, banning them from acquiring the most advanced AI chips, though Washington approved exports of Nvidia’s NVDA.O second-most advanced chip in December.
U.S. companies including ChatGPT developer OpenAI and Anthropic, creator of Claude, as well as traditional tech giants have, meanwhile, invested billions of dollars to remain at the forefront of the new technology.
But their position could be under threat.
“Open model proliferation creates alternative pathways to AI leadership,” the report said.
Some estimates suggest that around 80% of U.S. AI startups now use Chinese open-source AI models.
DeepSeek’s groundbreaking R1 model launched last year quickly overtook ChatGPT as the most downloaded model on the U.S. App Store. And Alibaba’s Qwen family of models has surpassed Meta’s META.O Llama in global cumulative downloads, according to HuggingFace.
