When regulators blocked Hugging Face in 2023, China’s developers did what the country’s internet has done before: they built a substitute.
Alibaba launched ModelScope in 2022, and it now hosts more than 170,000 models. OSChina opened MoArk a year later, serving roughly 20,000. Both keep Chinese-language open models one download away from developers who cannot count on a VPN.
OSChina chief executive Xu Yong told Rest of World that not everyone can use a VPN all the time, arguing the country needed a self-reliant stack for its own speakers. He says the independent ecosystem is forming faster in the AI era than it did in the internet era.
The result is a parallel market. Where OpenAI and Anthropic gate their models behind APIs, these platforms distribute weights that anyone can fine-tune and run on local hardware. That makes them attractive to researchers worldwide, even as Beijing tolerates labs quietly sharing Chinese models beyond the wall.
The backdrop has shifted. In September, Nvidia agreed to buy Hugging Face for $12.9B, a bet on open-source adoption. For China, the homegrown hubs are less about competing with that deal than about insurance, since access to foreign platforms can be cut at any moment.
