Annotation by mc dean on While OpenAI and Anthropic battle over data privacy, more companies look to open models and ‘sovereign AI’ | Fortune

An accord binds only the labs that sign it while the models it cannot reach are already everywhere. A few days after the closed labs signed a safety accord at the White House, Friedberg said the AI wars have already started. One side wants to centralize and regulate AI. The other knows open-weight models are already everywhere, running on small local machines no agency can reach. You cannot turn them off, and with 197 sovereign countries, no attempt to centralize control will succeed. He compares it to the fight for an open internet: telecoms wanted to charge a toll on access, and with open weights there is nobody to collect it. The labs at the summit were the closed ones. If the open weights cannot be turned off, the accord was a rule for the firms that had already agreed to be ruled.

The VCs on this panel would bet on open-source AI over OpenAI and Anthropic, and not because the open models are better. Jenny Fielding says customers care only about price and quality, and that open models are close enough to win. Dave McClure says he would put all of his money into hardware. His startups are already switching, he says, and the CEOs of ElevenLabs, Lovable and Figma have told him they do not trust the frontier labs: they see OpenAI and Anthropic as future competitors, not suppliers. Fielding is betting that price and quality will decide it, and the labs can cut prices. McClure's reason is trust, and a price cut doesn't fix that.