China’s open source AI models were Manufacturing recently for their strong performance in various AI tasks such as coding and “argumentation.”

However, they also met with criticism – including by OpenAI employees – for censoring topics sensitive to the Chinese government, such as the Tiananmen Square massacre.

Clement Delangue, CEO of Hugging Face, says he has similar concerns. In a current one Podcast (in French), he warned of the unintended consequences of Western companies building on powerful, open-source Chinese AI.

“If you create a chatbot and ask it a question about Tiananmen, it will not answer you in the same way as if it were a system developed in France or the US,” Delangue warned.

Delangue noted that if a country like China “becomes by far the strongest AI country, it will be able to spread certain cultural aspects that the Western world might not have liked to see.”

The CEO has already said that Chinese AI is quickly catching up with Western AI thanks to the adoption of the open source movement.

Delangue warned on the podcast that the heavy concentration of top open source models from China is a “pretty new development and I’m honestly a little worried about it,” he said. “It is important that AI is distributed across all countries – that there are not one or two countries that are much stronger than the others.”

Hugging Face is the world’s largest AI modeling platform and a popular place for Chinese AI companies to showcase their latest LLMs. Actually the CTO of Hugging Face announced this week that the default model on HuggingChat is Qwen2.5-72B-Instruct, developed by Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba.

This particular model does not appear to censor questions about the Tiananmen Square massacre or other topics problems are usually censored by the Chinese government.

However, another model from Alibaba’s Qwen family available on HuggingChat, QwQ-32B, clearly does this when TC asked:

DeepSeek, another Chinese model that went viral in the AI ​​community for its reasoning skills, also extensively censors topics deemed sensitive by the Chinese government, as TechCrunch previously did reported.

Chinese AI companies are in a difficult position, as is the Chinese government Forces Their models are said to “embody fundamental socialist values” and adhere to the already extensive censorship system.

A Hugging Face spokesperson declined further comment but noted that Delangue had not taken any action recently predicted China would take the lead in the global AI competition from 2025.