Clément Delangue

Clément Delangue (born 1988) is the co-founder and CEO of Hugging Face, the central platform of open-source AI. Raised in northern France, he cut his teeth at eBay and early machine-learning startups before founding Hugging Face in New York in 2016 with Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf — originally as a chatbot app for teenagers, named after the 🤗 emoji.

The face of open-source AI

The pivot made history: Hugging Face open-sourced its Transformers library in 2018, and the company became the place where the world shares machine learning — hosting millions of models, datasets, and demos from Llama to Stable Diffusion, under the mission of “democratizing good machine learning.” Investors including Google, Amazon, Nvidia, and Salesforce valued it at $4.5 billion in 2023. When labs closed up through the boom, Hugging Face became the commons — the counterweight where researchers, startups, and hobbyists could still build on shared weights.

Delangue has carried that argument to Washington. Testifying before the US House Science Committee in June 2023, he argued that open science and open source are “extremely aligned” with American values and interests, that openness bolsters transparency and external scrutiny, and that ethical openness is safer than concentration in a few private labs. He has warned against both premature regulation of open models and the industry’s tilt toward secrecy, and by 2026 was arguing that companies are done “renting” closed AI and want open models they control. Critics of open weights counter that what everyone can inspect, anyone can misuse; Delangue’s rebuttal is that a thousand watchdogs beat one black box.