AI is becoming closed, echoing software's open-source fight

Key takeaway

• An influential technologist warns that artificial intelligence is becoming closed and concentrated in a few companies, reversing the open-source principles that drove decades of software progress.

• Unlike the open-source movement—which proved that transparency enabled community-driven innovation, security through scrutiny, and broad knowledge-sharing—today's frontier AI systems are locked away, making it impossible for users to understand how they work or audit their reasoning.

• The risk extends beyond software: if most future science comes to rely on opaque AI, scientific progress itself may become locked inside private companies.

3 Key Points

FAQ

What is the difference between open and closed AI models that the author describes?

Open models (released by some Chinese labs and American companies) provide the code to run them, but hold back the code that built them and the data they learned from. The author calls this 'magic numbers you can run but cannot explain'—useful to deploy, but you cannot see how they were created. Closed frontier models are locked completely.

Why does the author say closed AI is a problem for trust and accountability?

When a company controls what a model can or cannot do and shapes how it reaches answers, anyone relying on it cannot fully understand the results. An explanation the model provides is a story assembled after the fact, not a faithful record of the computation. Ask the same question next year and you may get a different answer with no way to know whether the world changed or the vendor did.

What does the author say about the safety argument for keeping AI closed?

The author acknowledges the argument is not entirely crazy—releasing software is not like publishing a research paper, since the software itself is the capability. However, the author argues the conclusion does not follow: science itself could be classified under the same logic, yet it stays open and is instead monitored with rules. Closed models leak and get jailbroken anyway, and their concentration creates its own danger.