Startups & Ventures
⚠️ Chinese open-source models quietly become Silicon Valley’s hidden AI backbone
A new Bloomberg analysis highlights how much of the U.S. AI boom is now running on top of Chinese open-weight models, a shift driven by cost, licensing freedom, and sheer model quality.
🔸 Alibaba’s Qwen family has taken over Hugging Face: more than 40% of newly uploaded LLMs in 2024–25 are Qwen-based derivatives, dwarfing Meta’s LLaMA line.
🔸 Multiple U.S. startups are suspected of using Chinese base models under the hood: Cursor is linked to DeepSeek, while Cognition’s Devin is rumored to lean on Zhipu AI’s Z-series.
🔸 Developers cite price and permissive licensing, Qwen models are cheap to run, fully open-weight, and allow commercial fine-tuning without legal friction.
🔸 The trend is big enough that Nvidia’s Jensen Huang has warned China may “win the AI race” through developer scale even if the U.S. leads in advanced chips.
As Chinese models quietly become the substrate for U.S. AI products, the question isn’t just technical, it’s geopolitical: who truly owns the future stack that Silicon Valley is building on?
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