Open-source AI is pitched as freedom. What’s really in the box?

The strongest publicly downloadable large language models are, by the composite measure of Artificial Analysis’ Intelligence Index, GLM-5.2, MiniMax-M3, DeepSeek V4 Pro, and Kimi K2.6. They are all Chinese. They are all products of heavily capitalized laboratories. They are all released under permissive licenses and commonly described as open. They are open in the sense that you can download the weights, run them on your own machines, fine-tune them, build products on top of them. They are not open in the sense that you can see how they were made. The training data and code, the recipes that would allow you to reproduce or audit the process remain, for the most part, undisclosed. The door is ajar. The room behind it is dark.

The Open Source