Technology14 Jul 2026SEO 881 min read

Analysis: The real AI race may no longer be at the frontier

For several weeks this summer, the AI industry was fixated on Anthropic’s latest frontier models and Washington’s fight to control who was granted access to th…

For several weeks this summer, the AI industry was fixated on Anthropic’s latest frontier models and Washington’s fight to control who was granted access to them. But while everyone was watching the frontier, developers kept building — and they weren’t waiting around for permission from the Anthropics and OpenAIs of the world. Chinese open-weight models accounted for 41% of downloads on Hugging Face this spring, surpassing U.S. models. On OpenRouter , the top six most popular models are all ope…

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