Podbit · The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
On OpenRouter, the top six models by usage are Chinese. The first US model — Anthropic — ranks seventh. Arvind Jain and Harry Stebbings debate whether regulatory barriers or open-source innovation from the US can reverse this trend, or whether it's already too late to close the gap.
Where this was said
At 43:50 · chapter starts 42:20
Harry raises a question from the conference floor he's sitting in: we're in Europe, and sovereignty over AI models is becoming a real policy question. Arvind notes that the desire for sovereign national models peaked a year ago when everyone thought they could build one, but most countries have backed off as they've realised the investment requirements. [1] — Harry Stebbings "On OpenRouter, the top six models by usage are Chinese. The first US model — Anthropic — ranks seventh. Arvind Jain and Harry Stebbings deb…" 43:50 Harry then drops a striking data point: on OpenRouter, the top six models by usage are Chinese, with Anthropic as the first US model at rank seven. Arvind acknowledges this but argues the US won't accept this trajectory and that there is significant motivated capital — including NVIDIA — investing in US open-source model development. Harry pushes further, suggesting Sam Altman may be lobbying Trump for regulatory barriers against Chinese open-source models. Arvind pushes back on that scenario but doesn't entirely dismiss it, noting the US system needs to build competitively rather than win through regulation. The section ends with both agreeing that a multimodal competitive world — with US and non-US models — is important for everyone.
Every nation wanted sovereign AI models a year ago. Almost none succeeded. The reason: training a frontier model requires billions of dollars of upfront investment, making it fundamentally incompatible with the skunkworks, volunteer ethos of traditional open-source software development.
Harry Stebbings noted that on OpenRouter, the top six models by usage were Chinese, with the first US model (Anthropic) ranking seventh.
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