Clément Delangue

Clément Delangue is the co-founder and chief executive of Hugging Face, the platform that has become the de facto home for open-source machine learning models, datasets and tooling, used daily by researchers and engineers across virtually every AI lab in the world. A French entrepreneur based in New York, Delangue co-founded the company in 2016 with Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf, initially building a chatbot app aimed at teenagers, named after the 'hugging face' emoji.

The pivot that defined the company came when the founders open-sourced the underlying model behind their chatbot and watched developer interest in the tooling eclipse interest in the consumer app itself. Delangue steered Hugging Face to abandon the chatbot entirely and rebuild the company as an open platform for sharing and deploying machine learning models, a bet that positioned it at the centre of the generative AI boom that followed.

Under Delangue, Hugging Face grew into critical infrastructure for the AI industry: its Model Hub hosts hundreds of thousands of open models, including major releases from Meta, Mistral, Google and countless independent researchers, while its Transformers and Datasets libraries are standard tools in most production machine learning pipelines. The company reached a $4.5 billion valuation in August 2023 on a $235 million funding round backed by Google, Nvidia, Salesforce and others, cementing its role as the neutral ground of the open AI ecosystem even as rivals raced toward closed, proprietary models.

Delangue has used that position to become one of the AI industry's most prominent advocates for openness and transparency, arguing publicly that closed AI concentrates power dangerously and calling for 'radical transparency' after security incidents at rival labs. He has extended the company's open-source thesis into robotics, announcing the acquisition of Pollen Robotics in 2025 with the explicit goal of making AI-driven robotics open source, and has continued to argue that enterprises are moving away from simply renting AI from closed providers toward building on open foundations they can control.

In August 2026, Hugging Face agreed to be acquired by Nvidia in a deal reported at $12.9 billion, a transaction that would fold the world's leading open-model repository into the dominant AI hardware maker's ecosystem while, Delangue has argued, preserving its open and community-driven mission. The deal, alongside his frequent public commentary on AI policy and openness, underscores Delangue's position as one of the most influential voices shaping how open the AI industry's core infrastructure remains.