Two of the most valuable companies in American artificial intelligence, Anthropic and OpenAI, are preparing to go public at valuations near $1 trillion — valuations that rest on the promise of extraordinary profit margins. The fastest-growing challenge to those margins is not another well-funded AI lab. It is a wave of powerful AI models being given away for free. The newest of them was released in China just last week. Lobbyists are urging Washington to treat open-model AI as a security threat. In fact, it is something more familiar: proper competition that should be welcomed. Releasing an AI model openly is not a sign of tech idealism or of a foreign company’s gambit. Open-sourcing is a business strategy, one with a three-decade record of building large, profitable companies. Treating open-model AI instead as a danger to be licensed and contained is a category error, and would be a costly one. It mistakes the ordinary work of competition for a threat to be policed.

Full opinion : Chinese open models are proper competition that should be welcomed, not something to ban or treat as a danger, and open-sourcing is an old business strategy.