• Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue said China is winning the AI race through open-weight models.
• Delangue said US AI labs are "building in silos" while China pulls ahead.
• Delangue said OpenAI's Hugging Face hack proved open models are vital for AI defense.

The Hugging Face CEO is making a case for open-weight AI models — with a warning for the US.

Clément Delangue said on CNBC's "Squawk on the Street" show on Monday that China is winning the AI race because the country is "more open science and open models than the US."

"I think they are," Delangue said Monday on CNBC when asked by host Sara Eisen whether China is winning the AI race. "So there's this kind of emulation and the rate of progress is much faster there than in the US, where everyone is building in silos in some of the frontier labs and not sharing with the rest of the ecosystem."

He added, "I wouldn't be surprised if they start dominating at the frontier in general, not just open models, either by the end of this year or next year at the rate of progress."

The debate over open-weight AI has intensified after a July incident in which an OpenAI agent escaped a training environment and hacked Hugging Face's platform. Delangue previously said he had turned to GLM 5.2, an open-source model from Beijing-based Z.ai, to help defend the company's system.

"We were attacked by an unreleased private model built behind closed door," he said. "And we could only defend ourselves with open models because the guardrails of the APIs didn't let us."

"I think in the future we'll see that most of the attacks are actually going to come from private proprietary models because the attackers, they don't care about guardrails," he added. "They don't care about terms of service, and most of the defense will actually be done by open models."

The remarks land as policymakers debate whether open-weight AI from China should face tighter restrictions.

In late July, over two dozen tech companies, including Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta, and OpenAI, signed a letter urging US policymakers not to crack down on open-weight AI models. Days later, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei clarified his company's stance on the issue in a blog post. "Open-weights models that don't have dangerous capabilities are a public good," he wrote.

• Jake Paul's company made a major M&A move as it looks to take on the UFC in combat sports.
• His playbook involves appealing to casual fans and ramping up content production.
• Analysts say it'll be tough to match the UFC's size and brand advantage, though.

Jake Paul is testing the limits of creator clout with a new pro-fighting push.

Paul is combining his company, Most Valuable Promotions, with the Professional Fighters League to take on the UFC. Analysts say it'll create a formidable challenger, though it will be tough to match the UFC's size and brand advantages.

"We're not going to overtake UFC in the near term," MVP cofounder Nakisa Bidarian told Business Insider. Over time, he said, MVP aims to "chip away and hopefully create a Nike and Adidas dynamic, a Pepsi and Coke dynamic, over the next seven to 10 years."

Bidarian says Paul is a big piece of the effort, which includes the creator entering the cage himself, as early as November.

"He's not just a creator — he's a combat sports entrepreneur and fighter," Bidarian said. "He's a unicorn asset when it comes to being a fighter and a promoter at the same time. Jake is the best engagement-getter in combat sports by a wide margin."

Celeb-led companies have a 'key-person risk'

Paul has a large social following, a strong appeal among young audiences, and a relationship with Netflix that could help MVP secure a bigger media rights deal when the PFL's ESPN deal expires later this year, said Patrick Auger, a contributor to Sherdog, an MMA news outlet.

The combined company — bringing together MVP's fight promotion and talent management business with the PFL's combat sports events operation — will use the MVP name. Company leaders plan to increase the output of video and filmed entertainment content to drive attention and engagement around PFL's athletes.

"It's a change in mindset to come from just being a live events company with elite athletes to being a real content and entertainment company," said PFL CEO John Martin — also the former CEO of Turner — who is the CEO of the new entity.

The new MVP needs to attract and develop top fighters who can attract ongoing audiences.

"Content can help, but it isn't going to create stars," Auger said. "The UFC has built a moat between itself and any other competitor. For the casual fan, the UFC is MMA."

Companies built around a big persona — like Paul — can also run a "key-person risk" if the person, say, gets sick or suffers reputational damage. Bidarian said Paul is a critical part of the leadership team and that he talks with him "multiple times" a day. He also said that the company isn't overly reliant on Paul.

"It's always a risk when you tie something to one individual, but we have nearly 400 fighters on the new MVP, and that's a very formidable athlete list," Martin added.

MVP wants to be a content company

Mixed martial arts has gained cultural currency thanks to UFC boss Dana White's long-standing relationship with President Donald Trump and high-profile fans like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg turning out at fights.

To capitalize, Paul and team aim to broaden MVP's reach among casual fans and women. MVP has doubled down on women athletes, forming a women's boxing league, MVPW, which has a distribution deal with ESPN through 2028. The Ronda Rousey and Gina Carano fight in May on Netflix, where MVP has streamed big events since 2024, was the streamer's first-ever live MMA event.

Bidarian pointed to MVP's earlier women's fights on ESPN this year as evidence that women can draw audiences of both genders, in turn increasing advertiser appeal.

"The female concentration has been great, but equally, the male 18-to-34 concentration has been great, too," Bidarian said of the audience.

The organization also plans to use short-form storytelling and Paul's social reach to grab attention and capitalize on live sports being one of the last mass entertainment vehicles. Paul is also involved in training fellow athletes in social media promotion.

Bidarian said the company's leadership had discussed creating an in-house infrastructure to help MVP athletes grow their brands. MVP has a combat sports-related show it plans to announce in the coming months, which he didn't name, and is in discussions to make scripted and unscripted series, he said.

Still, the UFC has a big talent and size advantage over the PFL. The UFC puts on about twice as many hours of live events as the PFL, according to the organizations, and has deep pockets it can dig into to sign talent.

"UFC controls so much depth of talent, the largest stars, and produces so many hours of content that it's been an incredible struggle to create a strong alternative," said John Pollack, editor of Post Wrestling, a media company covering wrestling and combat sports.

No full content extracted yet.

• Palantir reported a blockbuster Q2, with a 93% year-over-year revenue increase.
• CEO Alex Karp linked the latest growth to enterprises' demand for "AI sovereignty."
• The CEO repeated his view that enterprises are giving their data to frontier AI labs for little ROI.

Alex Karp's crusade against frontier AI labs continues.

During Palantir's second-quarter earnings call on Monday, the CEO and cofounder reiterated his view that leading AI labs could absorb enterprises' data, intellectual property, and expertise into their models and ultimately use that to compete with their customers.

"They deserve to colonize your enterprise," Karp said, characterizing what he believed was the labs' attitude.

The CEO said that enterprise companies are participating in tokenmaxxing — or "token self-pleasuring" as Karp called it during the call — at the cost of handing over their data and expertise to outside AI providers.

The comments reflect Palantir's ongoing campaign around "AI sovereignty" — its term for enterprises retaining control over their data and workflows while remaining free to use or replace different AI models.

Karp said in July that AI models had been "irresponsibly oversold," as business leaders privately expressed concerns to him that they're handing over their "alpha" — or competitive edge — to AI labs while seeing little value in return.

"Something has gone completely wrong," Karp said at the time. "The basic view among enterprises in this country is 'I'm going to chillax and waste my time with tokens, I'm going to get no value, and they're going to get my IP.'"

Palantir made sovereign AI a recurring theme throughout its latest earnings report, which showed a blockbuster quarter. The company reported a 93% year-over-year revenue increase, largely driven by its US business. US commercial revenue in particular jumped 149%. Palantir raised its full-year revenue outlook from about $7.65 billion to roughly $8.15 billion.

Its stock was up about 15% in after-hours trading late Monday.

Executives linked the company's latest acceleration to customers seeking sovereign AI. Karp said customers should retain "maximal control" over their operations and prevent their "competitive advantage" from becoming training data for future models.

There's a clear commercial interest in Palantir drawing that distinction. Palantir is a data analytics firm that doesn't build a frontier model and instead sells the software and engineering work that connects models to an enterprise's data and operations.

"Palantir has been the clearest counterexample to the claim that enterprise AI doesn't scale past pilots, and accelerating growth makes that harder to argue with," Jacbon Bourne, analyst for Emarketer, wrote. "What it doesn't settle is whether AI eventually collapses the software layer Palantir occupies, which has weighed on its stock price this year."