AI NewsHugging Face’s CEO on why companies are done renting their AI

Hugging Face’s CEO on why companies are done renting their AI

6:04 AM IST · July 11, 2026

Loading the player… Open source AI is booming, according toHugging FaceCEOClem Delangue. The company has grown into something like a GitHub for AI in recent years, where AI builders can share and download open models and datasets, now used by roughly half the Fortune 500. Delangue has seen the same story play out again and again: companies start out on frontier APIs, but as they scale, the costs push them towards open source models. On this episode of TechCrunch’sEquitypodcast, Rebecca Bellan talked to Delangue about why the open vs closed source fight matters in the wake of Anthropic’s halted Fable release, and why he’s worried about the possibility that a handful of big companies could end up controlling everything. Subscribe to Equity onYouTube,Apple Podcasts,Overcast,Spotifyand all the casts. You also can follow Equity onXandThreads, at @EquityPod.