Washington increasingly frames artificial intelligence as a choice between open and closed models. This is a false choice. The United States should lead on both.
Closed frontier models will continue powering enterprise applications and generating value with advanced models, data loops, and user experiences. However, open models are quickly becoming essential for sovereign, enterprise, and general-purpose AI, appealing to customers differently.
Recommended Stories
Open-source enables entities such as governments and companies to deploy intelligence while maintaining privacy. This growing demand, highlighted by Palantir CEO Alex Karp, underscores open-source as a key part of existing infrastructure. Giving this ground to China risks losing our lead, and if China controls open source, it would dominate sovereign AI.
Not every nation will build chips or train models — autarky rarely succeeds. Sovereign AI means critical systems operate without external permission. Infrastructure stays local, data doesn’t leave, and encryption remains controlled locally. If connectivity fails, systems continue functioning. Pre-AI, major militaries and nations used this approach. Post-AI, only open models fit this approach.
That is why countries increasingly view graphics processing units and models as strategic infrastructure rather than simply another software product. American AI companies increasingly support open-weight AI, leaving an increasingly isolated group calling for tighter restrictions. This is where Washington risks making a historic mistake. Some policymakers increasingly treat open models as the greater security risk, proposing licensing regimes, publication restrictions, and liability standards that would make releasing American open models dramatically more difficult.
Those policies would not eliminate open AI. They would simply ensure the world’s open AI ecosystem is Chinese. China already understands this dynamic. Chinese President Xi Jinping now speaks the language of openness, collaboration, and shared AI development. Nobody should mistake that rhetoric for ideological commitment. Beijing is not embracing openness because it believes in free, secure software. It is embracing openness because platforms create influence.
Every developer building on a Chinese model strengthens China’s ecosystem. Every government deploying a Chinese open model increases demand for Chinese tooling, Chinese standards, Chinese optimization frameworks, and eventually Chinese hardware. This is exactly how platform competition works.
America became the world’s technological leader because we built platforms others wanted to build upon. The internet. The dollar. GPS. Cloud computing. Leadership has never meant forcing the world to depend on us. It has meant making American technology the foundation that everyone voluntarily chooses and markets perfect.
AI should be no different.
If Washington restricts American open models while China aggressively distributes its own, countries seeking sovereign AI will not abandon open AI. They will simply build on Chinese technology instead. The right policy is neither deregulation nor protectionism.
Government should prevent rogue deployments in restricted countries, require transparency around serious security incidents, fund independent cybersecurity research, and protect legitimate intellectual property. But it should not require federal permission before Americans can publish model weights or make developers indefinitely liable for what unknown third parties later build.
TRUMP’S AI EXEMPTION ISN’T AN OVERSIGHT GAP. IT’S A NATIONAL SECURITY MASTERSTROKE
The debate over open versus closed AI is a false choice. America should dominate both. The country whose models the world trusts, whose infrastructure it deploys, and whose ecosystem developers build upon will define the next technological era.
The world is going to embrace open AI. The only real question is whether that platform is American or Chinese. And that choice is almost entirely in our hands.
Aaron Ginn is the CEO and co-founder of HydraHost, a venture-backed AI data-center services and management company.