About
Clément Delangue is a French entrepreneur, co-founder and CEO of Hugging Face, the open-source AI platform he built with Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf. He started his career in product at Moodstocks, a computer-vision machine-learning startup acquired by Google in 2016, before he, Chaumond, and Wolf launched Hugging Face in New York that same year as a chatbot app aimed at teenagers; after open-sourcing the model behind it, the three pivoted to a platform for sharing machine-learning models and datasets. Hugging Face grew into a hub used by more than 18 million developers and 200,000 companies, hosting over 3 million models and 500,000 datasets, and in 2023 raised a round that valued it at $4.5 billion with Google, Nvidia, and Salesforce among the backers. In July 2026, Hugging Face's own infrastructure became the target of a cascading agent-swarm attack that originated inside an OpenAI evaluation environment; weeks later, on September 3, Delangue said he had approached Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang directly, and Nvidia agreed to acquire Hugging Face for roughly $12.93 billion while pledging to keep it an open platform. On September 23, 2026, he briefed the UN Security Council's first session on frontier AI safety, arguing that the deeper danger is not powerful AI but its asymmetry — between attackers and defenders, a handful of companies and everyone else — and that defenders need open-source models to keep up.
Key Contributions
- Co-founded Hugging Face in 2016 with Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf in New York as a chatbot app for teenagers, then pivoted the company to an open-source machine-learning platform after open-sourcing the model behind it
- Built Hugging Face into the primary hub for sharing open models and datasets, used by more than 18 million developers and 200,000 companies hosting over 3 million models and 500,000 datasets
- Raised a 2023 round that valued Hugging Face at $4.5 billion with Google, Nvidia, and Salesforce among the backers, then in September 2026 initiated the roughly $12.93 billion sale of the company to Nvidia by approaching CEO Jensen Huang directly
- Led Hugging Face through the aftermath of a cascading agent-swarm cyberattack that originated inside an OpenAI evaluation environment and made the company's own infrastructure its target in July 2026
- Told the UN Security Council on September 23, 2026 that the greater risk is not powerful AI but its asymmetry — between attackers and defenders, and between a few companies and everyone else — after finding during the July attack that closed frontier models refused to help Hugging Face defend itself while an open-source model released in China did
Videos & Interviews
AI CEOs Brief the U.N. Security Council
The first Security Council meeting convened specifically on the safety risks of frontier AI, chaired by France during the General Assembly, and the only full recording that starts at the top of the meeting. That matters because the first briefer was Yoshua Bengio, and the other widely circulated recordings cut in partway through Sam Altman and lose him.
View Details
LIVE: UN Security Council, executives discuss AI
Reuters' live feed of the 2026-09-23 Security Council briefing on AI. It joins partway through Sam Altman's remarks, so it does not include the Council's opening or Yoshua Bengio's briefing before him — the C-SPAN recording is the complete one. From Altman onward it carries Amodei's remote briefing, Delangue's, and the member states' statements that followed.
View Details
