The two ecosystems are diverging — though not as cleanly as the "closed US vs. open China" framing suggests. US frontier labs mostly sell access to closed models through paid APIs, but Meta's Llama and OpenAI's open-weight gpt-oss release (its first open weights since GPT-2) complicate that binary. Meanwhile, Chinese labs — DeepSeek, Alibaba's Qwen, Moonshot, and Z.ai — are releasing capable open-weight models on aggressive schedules that anyone can download, self-host, and fine-tune.
For capital-constrained developers and governments in the region, the cheap, adaptable option is increasingly the Chinese one. Deutsche Bank analyst Adrian Cox has framed the broader split as Android versus Apple — open and customizable versus closed and proprietary — and on that axis, Chinese labs are currently the more aggressive open-weight shippers. A 2026 RAND analysis goes further, arguing both Washington and Beijing now treat open models as instruments of soft power — while cautioning that hard data on who's actually adopting what remains limited.
The risks here are real. But they're often overstated into "sleeper cell" rhetoric that doesn't survive scrutiny.
In February 2026, Chile launched Latam-GPT — an open-source model coordinated by CENIA with more than 60 partner institutions across 15 countries, trained primarily in Spanish and Portuguese, with Indigenous-language inclusion planned as a future phase. The model draws on an 8-plus-terabyte regional text corpus and roughly 300 billion tokens (about 230 billion words) compiled from official regional sources, aimed at cutting the cultural bias baked into models trained mostly on English-language web text.
The initial build ran lean: about $550,000 in core funding, mainly from development bank CAF, with a separate ~$5 million supercomputer at Universidad de Tarapacá slated to host future training runs. Then-President Gabriel Boric personally led the launch, framing it as a way to make the region "un actor activo y soberano" — an active and sovereign actor — in the AI economy. Tellingly, version 1 was trained on AWS: sovereignty here is being built incrementally, not declared.
An open question worth watching: Latam-GPT was a flagship of the Boric government, which handed power to José Antonio Kast's right-wing administration in March 2026. Whether a project premised on regional integration and shared public data repositories survives that transition intact will show whether "digital sovereignty" in Latin America is a durable state policy or a temporary political trend.
The honest lesson: the region's answer to foreign open weights is its own open weights, paired with local compute infrastructure, rigorous auditing standards, and diversified cloud suppliers. Non-alignment isn't about picking the "safe" superpower. Neither one is offering dependency-free AI.
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