6 months to live for open models

The most serious test to date of open source AI’s viability is happening right now. I’ve seen many waves of anti open-source AI rhetoric come and go since ChatGPT was launched, but none of them had obvious analogues in their potential enforcement to real action already in place targeting the peer, closed models of the day. It is more real because new forms of regulation are being tested and implemented, with minimal oversight. I will be doing far more policy-facing writing than usual until this passes. As of writing this, many sources are citing White House discussions on how to manage open models via a new executive order. There is no official information here, and it would likely impact a) Chinese-origin models and b) government uses only, but this is how the dominoes start to fall. Open models lack the central economic champion to represent the potential downside of action against them. From recent coverage of the events surrounding model licensing agreements for Fable (and then GPT-5.6), more was said about what unfolded on June 9th: At the meeting, the topic of how the program will deal with open-source…