The Great Freakout Over Open-Source AI Has Begun

Remember when the Chinese open-source AI model DeepSeek was first made public, and everyone freaked out? Welcome to Round Two. When Chinese AI lab Moonshot AI dropped its latest model, Kimi K3, last week, it caused quite an uproar—including a long-winded meditation on the open-source approach from Dean Ball, the recently hired “Head of Strategic Futures” at OpenAI, in which he called the non-walled-off approach to AI development a risk that makes AI “ungovernable.” Ball said that Kimi K3 is competitive with the top American models, which appears true: benchmarking reportedly puts it on par with Anthropic’s Claude Fable and OpenAI’s GPT-5.6. But he has doubts about the open-source approach. “I am personally surprised the Chinese state continues to allow the open sourcing of models this good, given potential risks,” he said. “To be clear, I myself might be fine with models presenting this level of marginal risk being open weight, but I am surprised that China is fine with it.” 1. It's a very good model! I don't think its performance can be explained away by distillation or anything like that. In agentic coding sessions, it seems pretty much on par with the best public models of Q1 20