The Token Economy • Open Source and The Free Tier

On August 4, in a closed-door meeting at the White House, the government told America's leading AI companies which models its new pre-release security review will cover. The answer was the ones they build. Free, downloadable models, known as open weights, are exempt, including the Chinese systems Washington spent July threatening to sanction. The decision capped a ten-day public split inside the industry: a letter defending open models drew 25 corporate signatures on July 24 and passed 270 by August 3, with OpenAI and Google joining within days and Anthropic, alone among the frontier labs, staying off. One reading says the government just conceded the commodity tier of intelligence to Beijing and handicapped its own champions. The other says it recognized where the money in this buildout actually lands. The order books have been keeping score.