The US government’s shock moves to restrict access to top artificial intelligence systems from Anthropic and OpenAI have sparked growing interest in open-source models — especially ones from China.<\/p>\n
The de facto bans from an anti-regulation White House blindsided the tech world, which had grown accustomed to AI labs releasing ever more powerful models with nary a worry of government intervention.<\/p>\n
The episode has thrust a long-simmering debate to the fore: open versus closed AI.<\/p>\n
Most of the best-known AI models — like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude — are “closed,” meaning the company keeps the underlying code and data locked away.<\/p>\n
Users can access the AI via an app or website, mainly through a subscription, but the company controls who gets in and can shut down access at any time.<\/p>\n
“Open-source” or “open-weight” models work differently: the developers release the model’s core files for anyone to download, modify and run on their own computers. Once released, no one — not the company, not a government — can take them back.<\/p>\n
In early June, the Trump administration ordered Anthropic to block non-Americans from using its most powerful — and closed — models, Mythos 5 and Fable 5.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Faced with the complexity of screening users, the startup simply pulled the models offline entirely.<\/p>\n
Shortly after, OpenAI agreed to let the government approve every customer for its newest model, GPT-5.6.<\/p>\n
“If everything you need to do has to be on a specific frontier model, that makes whatever you’re building a whole lot less reliable” when it is suddenly unavailable, said Oren Michels, co-founder and CEO of Barndoor AI.<\/p>\n
Haitham Mengad, co-founder of Stems Labs, a startup focused on AI-powered music creation, felt the disruption firsthand.<\/p>\n
“Fable has been a game-changing model for me. Honestly, when they took it off, it was the first time that I realized… it’s almost like a drug,” he recalled.<\/p>\n
The Mythos episode “was a powerful moment” for seeing open source as an alternative, Mengad said.<\/p>\n
– ‘Being flexible’ –<\/p>\n
Open models were already gaining fans because using closed AI keeps getting more expensive.<\/p>\n
Around the same time, China’s Zhipu AI (also known as Z.ai) released GLM-5.2, an open model that performed nearly as well as top offerings from Anthropic and OpenAI on several benchmarks.<\/p>\n
“GLM-5.2 is free to download, fine-tune, and run on an enterprise’s own servers, putting pricing pressure on frontier labs at the same time that access looks shaky,” AI analyst Andrew Curran noted.<\/p>\n
On OpenRouter, a platform that routes requests across different AI models, Google, Anthropic and OpenAI’s combined share of usage dropped from 55 percent to 33 percent between January and June.<\/p>\n
China’s open DeepSeek now leads by a clear margin.<\/p>\n
“You want to be as flexible as you can be. Maybe a year and a half ago some large company might say we bought Anthropic or we bought OpenAI, and now no one, no one buys only one,” said Michels.<\/p>\n
Among Western companies, France’s Mistral stands largely alone in championing open models. US tech giant Meta, once a vocal open-source advocate, has stepped back from that.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, early suspicions about Chinese AI models as a security threat are fading, at least somewhat.<\/p>\n
“I don’t think there’s any risk, to be honest,” said Mengad. The fears are more “psychological, emotional than rational.”<\/p>\n
Once you download an open model and run it on your own hardware, the company that made it — Chinese or otherwise — has no access to your data or control over how you use it.<\/p>\n
Still, some experts think the government crackdown could also end up coming for open models as they become more powerful.<\/p>\n
“If Mythos-level models are considered risky, China will also not want them to be open,” said Ethan Mollick, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a leading voice on AI — meaning governments everywhere, not just Washington, may want to keep top-tier AI locked down.<\/p>\n
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