Artificial intelligence startup HuggingFace says it is aware of "regrettable accessibility issues in China" after the country blocked access to the platform, which hosts more than 365,000 open source artificial intelligence models.
"The AI community in China is incredible and we would like them to have better access to HF, but there is currently nothing we can do about government regulations," a spokesperson for HuggingFace said in an email on Friday.
It's unclear when HuggingFace, a startup valued at $4.5 billion, began to come under scrutiny. As early as May this year, Chinese users complained about connection issues on the company's forums. Newsletter ChinaTalk reported on Wednesday that HuggingFace has been completely unavailable in China since at least September 12
The Chinese government frequently blocks access to websites containing content the government deems inappropriate, but it's unclear what led to the decision to censor HuggingFace. The culprit may be local regulations that took effect in August, requiring companies to register artificial intelligence services and ensure they comply with existing content restrictions.
Originally founded in 2016, HuggingFace has become one of the biggest beneficiaries of the recent boom in generative AI technology. Developers can use its platform to collaborate on machine learning projects or share datasets. It works similarly to GitHub, the code repository hosting site owned by Microsoft.
China has also previously blocked access to GitHub, or at least some of its pages, but the site remains regularly accessible, most likely due to the important role it plays in the Chinese software engineering ecosystem. Without access to the library of open source resources it hosts, many developers would be unable to perform their job responsibilities.
Earlier this month, on China's Zhihu question-and-answer platform, users discussed the potential impact of banning Huugian in a since-deleted thread. "I'm really sad that this is killing our own competitiveness - today, when artificial intelligence is rapidly improving productivity, shutting ourselves down like this really determines that, at least in the field of artificial intelligence, we will inevitably fall behind." One of the comments read.