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When President Trump released the U.S. AI Action Plan last week, many were surprised to see “encourage open-source and open-weight AI,” as one of the administration’s top priorities. The White House has elevated what was once a highly technical topic into an urgent national concern — and a key strategy to winning the AI race against China.
China’s emphasis on open source, also highlighted in its own Action Plan released shortly after the U.S., makes the open-source race imperative. And the global soft power that comes with more open models from China makes their recent leadership even more notable.
When DeepSeek-R1, a powerful open-source large language model (LLM) out of China, was released earlier this year, it didn’t come with a press tour. No flashy demos. No keynote speeches. But it was open weights and open science. Open weight means anyone with the right skills and computing resources can run, replicate, or make a model their own; open science shares some of the tricks behind the model development.
Within hours, researchers and developers seized on it. Within days, it became the most-liked model of all time on Hugging Face — with thousands of variants created and used across major tech companies, research labs and startups. Most strikingly, this explosion of adoption happened not just abroad, but in the U.S. For the first time, American AI was being built on Chinese foundations.
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DeepSeek wasn’t the only one
Within a week, the U.S. stock market — sensing the tremor — took a tumble.
It turns out Deepseek was just the opening act. Dozens of Chinese research groups are now pushing the frontiers of open-source AI, sharing not only powerful models, but the data, code and scientific methods behind them. They’re moving quickly — and they’re doing it in the open.
Meanwhile, U.S.-based companies — many of which pioneered the modern AI revolution — are increasingly closing up. Flagship models like GPT-4, Claude and …