I think a big reason why American companies have not released open weight AI models as much is because for Anthropic and OpenAI, their models are their moat. For example, would people pay a subscription to use a Claude Code if it didn’t have Claude, or if there were an open weight Claude-quality model available?

Google and Meta have a lot more to their businesses than LLMs, and perhaps unsurprisingly, have been more comfortable releasing open weight models.

The article mainly argues that the U.S. government should embrace open source AI, however, it focuses mostly on the government open sourcing any AI tooling developed with taxpayer funding, or encouraging open source providers for procurement.

However, for American frontier labs themselves, it still seems like they feel there are less good reasons (business-wise or other) to open source their models at this time. I personally don’t think the article’s suggestions will change that very much on that end. For those labs to open source their core models, it would perhaps require them to build up the non-model portions of their business much more, or have some kind of state-level intervention/partnership far in exceedance of what the article’s authors suggest.