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.
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A technology leader, reflecting on decades-old debates with free software pioneer Richard Stallman, argues that artificial intelligence is now following the opposite path—moving toward closed systems controlled by a few companies, rather than the open, shared approach that transformed software development.
Why it matters
The body argues that when AI becomes closed, it risks locking away knowledge at a critical moment—while the science is still young and methods are unsettled. It also means doctors, engineers, judges, and ordinary people relying on these systems cannot fully understand how they reach their answers, trusting what amounts to an oracle they cannot examine. The author contends that openness accelerated the tech industry by spreading knowledge and training a generation of engineers; closed AI risks reversing that progress.
What to watch
The author distinguishes between two types of code: the code that runs a model (which some companies now release) and the code that built it plus the data it learned from (which companies hold back). Even the release of runnable code is framed as a courtesy with no commitment—companies make no promise to keep doing so for their most capable systems tomorrow.
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