Tweet by KentonVarda

July 24, 2026

I would honestly go a step further than all these people and say: Our goal should be that, eventually, all frontier models are open-weight. There may be some messiness in the short term around making sure defenders have a chance to fix security bugs before the models reach attackers. But this should be seen as temporary. We can reach a steady state where offensive capabilities of these models aren't a big deal because we've already prepared defenses. This has frankly been the story of computer security all along, it has always been an arms race, but things have nevertheless gotten broadly better over time. It'll be OK. Otherwise, the only long-term benefit of closed models seems to be that they are easier for the labs to monetize in order to fund training of new models. But do they really need that? The Chinese labs seem to have found business models that don't require this. And does charging for inference even work as a business model? Competition -- including from Chinese labs -- seems likely to drive inference profits to zero anyway. And model makers charging per token creates all sorts of perverse incentives. I think we should find some other business model here. I think we should even be willing to consider (gasp) government subsidies. AI will create value across the entire economy. What if we pay for model training by raising corp taxes, and then make all the weights open? Just throwing that out there as a straw man -- the real answer will be more complicated, I'm sure. If we *don't* do this, then frankly it seems to me that Chinese models will dominate the world, not necessarily because they are the best (though maybe they will get there), but just because they are open and ours aren't. It would be a pity if that's why American models lose in the end.

Author
KentonVarda
Date
July 24, 2026
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