Earlier this week, I argued that the AI industry’s plea for federal regulation looks an awful lot like regulatory capture unfolding in real time. But the effort to lock in Big AI’s advantage goes further than plain Washington rulemaking. It also includes a campaign against open-source AI, the one form of competition the biggest labs cannot fully control.
The divide is simple. Open-source AI makes model code, weights, or other core components available for outside developers, researchers, and smaller companies to inspect, modify, and build upon. Closed-source systems, by contrast, are controlled by companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic, which keep the workings of their most valuable models proprietary.
This is why sweeping AI “governance” would do more than regulate the industry: it could crush Big AI’s most serious competition, not only by imposing costs and restrictions that only the largest firms can afford, but by making open-source development effectively impossible. Open-source AI’s very nature depends on the absence of a centralized gatekeeper. Once government requires one, that model simply no longer works.
Vice President JD Vance hinted at this problem during an interview on the All-In podcast. He blasted frontier AI companies for calling on government to regulate them after creating the supposed threat, while denying others access to the defensive tools needed to counter their models. Because doing otherwise could force them to reveal trade secrets, and strengthen the case for open-source AI.
U.S. Vice President JD Vance had some unusually strong words for Anthropic on the All-In Podcast.
— Rohan Paul (@rohanpaul_ai) September 16, 2026
If an AI company develops technology that can be used for harmful purposes, such as cyberattacks, he believes that company has an obligation to help others defend themselves against… https://t.co/vfXQke7BMy pic.twitter.com/m0vbN8QUBV
“Why is it that the people who are at the frontier of the AI economy are throwing up their hands and saying, ‘Well, we’ve built Frankenstein,’ and the solution to Frankenstein, apparently, is to create a one-world governance structure for artificial intelligence?" the vice president asked.
What I would say to those people is: if you’re building Frankenstein, stop. Or maybe, if the cat is out of the bag, then build the defensive mechanism against Frankenstein. At the same time that you have this sort of cyber-hacking tool that’s come out of Anthropic’s newest models, you have companies that are desperate for the defensive mechanisms to defend against that cyber-hacking tool, and they’re being denied access to it.
"So if you’re going to create Frankenstein, don’t come to the government and say, ‘We need regulation,’" Vance said. "Look inward and accept that if you’re building Frankenstein, number one, you should stop. And number two, when the companies come to you and say, ‘We need the tools to fight back against Frankenstein,’ give them those tools.”
No company should be forced by law to hand competitors the tools needed to defeat or exploit its own products. But companies developing increasingly powerful AI systems do bear responsibility for ensuring those systems do not inflict serious harm.
If government regulation becomes the primary response to AI’s potential dangers, Washington may destroy one of the country’s strongest defenses against concentrated AI power: open-source development and genuine market competition.
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