Members Newsletter – August 2026
Dear OSI community,
I know it seems like it’s all any of us are hearing about lately, but I need a minute to talk about Open Source and AI.
Every model making headlines today, open or closed, sits on top of Open Source code, runs on Open Source infrastructure, and is based on openly shared research. That’s not sentiment, it’s just the history of how we got here. None of this exists without the Open Source community. So when I read that Washington is weighing trade block-lists and executive orders aimed at Open Weights and Open Source AI, I don’t read it as a technology story. I read it as a question about whether the commons this community built is going to be treated as a powerful strength we need to protect, or a potential threat we need to deter.
We’ve spent this year making the case that it’s the former, in our comments to the White House, in our work with the G7 on its Vision on AI Openness, and in conversations with our global community. The argument isn’t complicated: openness doesn’t check passports, restricting American access to Open Weights and Open Source AI doesn’t make them disappear, it just makes us less able to study and secure the ones the rest of the world keeps using. And the people who’d pay for that mistake first aren’t the big labs in the headlines, they’re the startups and small teams who rely on being able to see, modify, and run what they depend on.
