Sam Altman stood before the US Senate on May 8, 2025, and made a case that would have sounded heretical coming from him just a year ago: America needs to win the open-source AI race too.
The OpenAI CEO told lawmakers the US should lead in both open-source and closed-source AI models, announcing that his company plans to release a leading open-source model this summer. For a company that built its brand on proprietary, closed systems, that’s a notable reversal.
OpenAI’s open-source pivot
Earlier in 2025, Altman publicly acknowledged that OpenAI had been “on the wrong side of history” when it came to open-source AI.
The competitor in question is primarily DeepSeek, a Chinese AI initiative that has made significant strides in open-source model development. China’s rapid progress in freely available AI tools created a strategic problem for the US: if the best open models come from Beijing, so does the influence over how global developers build on top of them.
