The leading open-weight AI models charge a tiny fraction of what the big Western labs charge for a comparable amount of work. In an essay titled
"Open-weight" models are ones whose finished brains are published for anyone to download and run, as opposed to "closed" models you can only rent through a company's service. Our on Western labs raising exactly these alarms. His point isn't that distillation is fine; it's that "protect our intellectual property" and "protect our prices" can be the same incentive wearing two different hats.
His constructive ask is for "true" open source, not just published weights but open training data too, so the whole recipe is inspectable, and he points to academic and government-backed efforts as examples of what that could look like.
This is the economic and political frame underneath one of 2026's defining tensions, a cheap, open commodity floor pressing up against an expensive, closed premium, now spilling into Washington. It reframes the distillation fight: what gets described as a clean story about intellectual-property theft is also, unavoidably, a story about who gets to keep charging a premium. The same dynamic shows up in our earlier coverage of how , where every claim is checked against the primary source.
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