Asserting American Leadership in Open Source AI

Asserting American Leadership in Open Source AIA policy agenda to promote and protect the foundation of the global AI ecosystem Jai Ramaswamy and Matt PeraultApr 28, 20262ShareThe competitive landscape in AI is shifting. The next phase won’t be defined only by who builds the best model, but by who builds the best platform for building models. Open source tools [1] will play an essential role in this shift. Because open source tools are cheap to access and give developers wide latitude to modify them, they are likely to become the cornerstone for global AI development by startups and researchers.The stakes are high. The models that serve as the foundation of AI development—not just AI use—will become the underlying infrastructure for the world’s AI systems. Whoever supplies that infrastructure can influence not just the technology’s direction, but also the incentives and norms embedded in the ecosystem.If open source AI is the foundation for the future, then the status quo is troubling. Currently, among developers building with open source tools, 80% are using Chinese open source tools. A recent study conducted by a16z and OpenRouter indicates that open Chinese models accounted for as much as 30% of all AI usage in some weeks in 2025. And this past January, Chinese tech giant Alibaba reached a major milestone: its Qwen family of AI models became the most widely adopted open AI system in the world, surpassing 700 million downloads on Hugging Face alone. This came just a year after Chinese developer DeepSeek released the weights for a new frontier model, which performed comparably to leading models and has since exploded in popularity around the world. The conclusion from this data is clear: even if American proprietary AI systems lead the world, China is currently leading in open source AI development.US policymakers are beginning to appreciate the stakes, but more needs to be done to assert American leadership in open source AI. Policymakers should protect and promote American open source development, taking steps to protect open source tools from undue restraints while also promoting open source use and adoption.What is open source and why does it matter?A brief history of open source softwareOpen source in software has a long and rich history. The term “open source” typically refers to publicly distributing the source code for software, often to encourage community-driven development and improvements. For software to be open source, it must allow anyone to exercise four basic freedoms in perpetuity: to use, study, modify, and share it with relatively little restriction. Open source software is typically distributed with permissive licenses that allow anyone to freely download, modify, and re-share the code. The definition of “open source software” is maintained by the Open Source Initiative (OSI), which focuses on 10 specific conditions that a copyright license must meet. OSI has undertaken an effort to extend this definition to AI with the OSAID, an effort that remains ongoing.Open source software has become critical to the technology industry and our economy. The open copyright licenses provide legal certainty for anyone who wants to build on and improve the product. This certainty is crucial for businesses, but also for individual developers and hobbyists who need to easily collaborate in public codebases, including on popular services like Github, without getting bogged down in the legal details. The impact is vast: research from…

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