@levie: In a world where there are strong open source alternatives that are only just behind the frontier models, you make your…
Summary
A commentary arguing that restricting access to frontier AI models in favor of closed-source alternatives is counterproductive, as strong open-source models close the gap and foreign ecosystems benefit from openness.
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Cached at: 07/20/26, 01:31 PM
In a world where there are strong open source alternatives that are only just behind the frontier models, you make yourself less secure and competitive by gatekeeping access to frontier model capabilities.
If you play this out, even if America could fully ban access to open source models, other ecosystems wouldn’t have that ban and they’d have a leg up on access to those models. They could use them against us -or just use them to better defend themselves- and our own companies wouldn’t be able to keep up.
The calculus of what you do about AI regulation simply must change to account for the fact that open weights models are far stronger than many expected.
David Sacks (@DavidSacks): Kimi K3 just fixed 15 critical security bugs that Codex and Fable refused because of “cyber guardrails.” There’s no reason to limit American models on tasks that Chinese models handle without issue. We’re only making ourselves less competitive.
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