On Open Weights and American AI Leadership

On the 24th, Microsoft published a letter titled Open Weights and American AI Leadership and currently fifty tech companies have signed it. The gist of the letter is, they want “open weight” AI models to be treated as a pillar of American national security.

It is a masterclass in conflation.

The letter spends paragraphs praising open source software. Linux. The internet. Scientific research. Sounds great. Then it pivots.. to Open Weight, not Open Source. Open weight models are framed as the natural successor to the Open Source tradition. They are not.

Open source means getting the recipe, the compiler flags, the training data provenance, the bug tracker so it can be studied, modified, and rebuilt from first principles. Open weights means receiving a forty billion parameter binary blob and being wished the best of luck. It is the difference between a cookbook and a frozen dinner. Both involve food, but only one allows the recipe to be changed.

The signatories of course know this. Most of them do not open source their frontier models. Most of them don’t actually open source anything at all. Imagine NVIDIA open sourcing their CUDA and GPU drivers? Yeah. That’s obviously not going to happen. So they want to release model weights. Or they release nothing at all and rent API access by the token and still get to call it “open”. Calling a weight dump “open” doesn’t make the model open source. It just means we know what the final state of the model was and can do some our own parameter tuning based on it. It’s not a bad thing, but it’s also not open source.

The geopolitical framing is equally convenient. The letter warns that restricting open weights will “drive innovation overseas.” Non American models are naturally treated as a looming threat to “good guy American models”. These are framed as the safe, sovereign choice. This from the same companies that store customer data in Dublin, train models in Singapore, and source chips from Taiwan. Sovereignty is a very flexible concept when it serves the bottom line.

What makes the posturing absurd is the timing. The AI frontier is being recast as a Cold War race. Congress is drafting bills. Export controls are expanding. Billions in defense contracts are being negotiated. All for a technology whose primary consumer use cases remain autocomplete, chatbots, and generating images of astronauts on horseback. The industrial applications are certainly promising. They are also mostly theoretical at this point. No one really knows if any of the use-cases we’re talking about it worth the associated cost. But the geopolitical architecture and rhetoric wars are being built before the building has an actual purpose.

The most cynical move of this letter is the underlying compute shift. The letter celebrates open weights (sorry open source) because they let organizations “run on their own infrastructure.” This sounds like empowerment. It is actually a capital expenditure transfer. Training a frontier model costs hundreds of millions. Running it at scale requires a data centers full of GPUs. This is the model we have at the moment and big tech has been subsidizing the consumer token costs since the start. If the real cost would hit us, I doubt we’d see widespread AI adoptation. So new revenue streams are sorely needed to pull these companies out of red bottom lines. The signatories of the letter are not offering to build those data centers. They are offering you a 120Gb binary VRAM blob and a table of numbers that might help you to do some fine tuning. You can build your own datacenters. Big tech keeps the training secrets, the cloud rental revenue, and the chip partnerships. The consumer gets the electricity bill and the cooling problem.

This is not open source. It is open cost.

The letter ends with a flourish about “American technological leadership” and “shared prosperity.” Shared by whom is the question. The signatories include the same half dozen companies that control every layer of the stack (yeah and ok, DoorDash, apparently for some reason) and keep swapping the 10 trillion dollar I.O.U between themselves. They control the chips. the cloud. The models and their distribution. They are not asking for an open ecosystem. They are asking for regulatory cover to keep selling binary blobs while the rest of the world buys the hardware and builds the datacenters to run them.

Open source lowered barriers. Open weights shift them. Open weights are ultimately a good thing, but I doubt this play is done with good, open sourced intentions. Quite the contrary, I’d imagine.

Maybe I’m cynical and jaded. Maybe time will prove me wrong. Maybe.