{"id":112401,"date":"2026-07-20T19:53:06","date_gmt":"2026-07-20T19:53:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/112401\/"},"modified":"2026-07-20T19:53:06","modified_gmt":"2026-07-20T19:53:06","slug":"the-great-freakout-over-open-source-ai-has-begun","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/112401\/","title":{"rendered":"The Great Freakout Over Open-Source AI Has Begun"},"content":{"rendered":"

Remember when the Chinese open-source AI model DeepSeek was first made public, and everyone freaked out? Welcome to Round Two. When Chinese AI lab Moonshot AI dropped its latest model, Kimi K3, last week, it caused quite an uproar\u2014including a long-winded meditation on the open-source approach from Dean Ball<\/a>, the recently hired \u201cHead of Strategic Futures\u201d at OpenAI, in which he called the non-walled-off approach to AI development a risk that makes AI \u201cungovernable.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ball said that Kimi K3 is competitive with the top American models, which appears true: benchmarking reportedly puts it on par<\/a> with Anthropic\u2019s Claude Fable and OpenAI\u2019s GPT-5.6. But he has doubts about the open-source approach. \u201cI am personally surprised the Chinese state continues to allow the open sourcing of models this good, given potential risks,\u201d he said. \u201cTo be clear, I myself might be fine with models presenting this level of marginal risk being open weight, but I am surprised that China is fine with it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some observations on Kimi: <\/p>\n

1. It’s a very good model! I don’t think its performance can be explained away by distillation or anything like that. In agentic coding sessions, it seems pretty much on par with the best public models of Q1 2026. In my fairly limited use, it also\u2026<\/p>\n

\u2014 Dean W. Ball (@deanwball) July 17, 2026<\/a><\/p>\n

Saying that he \u201cmight be fine\u201d with models like Kimi K3 being open source feels like it\u2019s doing some heavy lifting, given everything else Ball said in the post, including claiming that the only reason Moonshot and other Chinese labs are going open source is that \u201cthey are behind, and they know that very few people would pay for sub-frontier models from China,\u201d while implying the hidden reason they\u2019ve chosen this approach is because \u201cthey know open-weight models are effectively ungovernable, and they simply like the overall cloak of ungovernability open-weight models create over the whole of AI.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ball\u2019s real objection seems to be that open-source models put a dent in his company\u2019s bottom line. Ball called open source \u201cinherently decelerationist\u201d\u2014meaning it\u2019ll slow the development of AI\u2014and claimed, \u201cin the end, open-weight models deter further AI capex.\u201d In the end, that would lead to \u201cfull AI communism,\u201d he claimed: \u201cRather than a market product, AI is a \u2018public good\u2019 which will ultimately be provided by the state as a kind of \u2018digital public infrastructure.\u2019 This future strikes me as a dystopian hellscape, but I\u2019ve never met an open-weight models advocate who doesn\u2019t ultimately concede this is where things end.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ball\u2019s position seems to be that if we allow open source models to persist (which he\u2019s totally fine with and not at all threatened by, by the way!), it\u2019ll eventually erode the desire of closed-source labs like OpenAI to develop their model by making the technology a public utility instead of a business.<\/p>\n

How awful! Could you imagine a technology not being a purely profit-driven endeavour? Weird position to take from a company that was founded with a charter<\/a> that insisted if another company was going to beat it to achieving artificial general intelligence, it would cease operation and lend its resources to assist that company.<\/p>\n

Anyway, Ball theorized that the Trump administration will likely see the development of Chinese models as a threat and seek to ban them\u2014though he advised they wouldn\u2019t need to go that far. Instead, they could just issue a warning that there \u201cmay be backdoors in Chinese AI models,\u201d regardless of whether it\u2019s true or not. \u201cYou just create enough regulatory risk that every regulated enterprise backs off,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n

Seems he might be right about that. A recent Axios report<\/a> implied that the Trump administration may renew efforts to create an effective ban on foreign models. According to the outlet, the admin previously explored placing Chinese AI labs on the Commerce Department\u2019s \u201cEntity List,\u201d which would basically restrict them from operating in the US without a license. Trump also reportedly considered an executive order that would hold US companies accountable for any risks associated with hosting Chinese models, per Axios.<\/p>\n

But some folks close to the Trump administration are reportedly pushing back against the idea of such restrictions despite their general hawkishness toward China. David Sacks, the former AI and Crypto Czar to Trump, took aim at Ball over the weekend and said on X<\/a>, \u201cThe leading closed labs, already a duopoly in terms of AI model revenue, want the government to eliminate their open-source competition.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sacks is an interesting ally to the open-source cause here, given his fearmongering over China in the past\u2014but he\u2019s basically molded his position to fit his true cause: killing regulation. Sacks has long accused Anthropic of trying to run a regulatory-capture campaign<\/a>\u2014basically locking in strict guardrails that are designed to keep upstart models from knocking the top labs off their thrones. Now he sees OpenAI attempting to do the same, and he\u2019s not having it.<\/p>\n

Sacks likely doesn\u2019t really care about open source as an ideological principle, though. He more just wants to tear down the minimal bumpers that have been set up for AI models in the US. Sacks was reportedly the leader in killing federal AI legislation<\/a> that the industry itself was pushing for, and supported efforts to keep states from implementing their own regulations<\/a>.<\/p>\n

More than open-source models, Sacks wants to open the AI floodgates. Not surprising for a guy who reportedly has nearly 500 stakes in companies with ties to AI<\/a>. He\u2019s a powerful ally to the open-source movement given his proximity to the Trump administration, but he should be viewed with just as much skepticism, even if he might be aligned in this instance of pushing back against an industry leader pretty blatantly posturing for fear-based restrictions on a competing model because it\u2019s cheaper and \u201cforeign.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Remember when the Chinese open-source AI model DeepSeek was first made public, and everyone freaked out? Welcome to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":112402,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[24,1276,1471,25,6409,335,2770],"class_list":["post-112401","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ai","tag-ai","tag-ai-models","tag-artifical-intelligence","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-david-sacks","tag-open-source","tag-trump-administration"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112401","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=112401"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112401\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/112402"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=112401"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=112401"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=112401"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}