If open weight models are the future, U.S. AI companies are going to have a hard time

Top executives at leading Western AI companies are increasingly warning about the safety and national security risks posed by Chinese open-weight frontier models. What they tend not to mention is that these models are improving rapidly and, because they are freely available, pose a serious threat to Western labs’ business models. The most powerful models from U.S. labs such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind are closed, meaning the parameters that shape their outputs are kept…