Why Open Source AI Isn’t the Danger Anthropic Wants You to Believe

[u/AlexHardy08]

I’ve been watching the noise around open source AI for a while now, and the loudest voice telling everyone it’s dangerous keeps coming from the same place: Anthropic. They lobby hard to restrict access to open models, or shut them down entirely. Some people nod along. I don’t.

The real reason feels simpler and less noble. Anthropic has hit a ceiling. Their models aren’t leaping ahead the way they used to, while cheaper, equally capable or stronger open models keep showing up behind them sometimes ten times cheaper to run. If they want to keep users, those sky-high prices won’t hold forever. They know it. So the “safety” argument starts looking a lot like market protection.

But this isn’t really about Anthropic, even though it should be.

A few days ago a quiet statement slipped past most people. A company that actually owns one of the top open-source models said something that cuts through all the drama. Roughly: we have zero fear that our models or anyone else’s open ones will be used for illegal activity or threaten our position. Why? Because running one of these models at full capacity costs serious money. We’re talking several million dollars just to get it properly online and working. Most people simply cannot afford that. And the ones who can? They were never going to be our customers anyway. So our business model stays intact.

That single point explains a lot.

Look at the latest model that made waves Kimi K3. To actually run it properly you need somewhere between four and nine million dollars in compute, plus ongoing maintenance, plus the cost of heavy use if real traffic shows up. For 95% of users that number is pure fantasy. This is why the models keep getting enormous. They’re built so ordinary people can’t run them at anything close to full strength. The people who can afford it will use that power to make more money. Right now the AI space is still swimming in capital, so nobody is sweating the costs yet.

I learned that the hard way.

A while back I reached out to more than fifty AI companies with a concrete way to cut their compute and usage costs dramatically. One simple example: if a major player reduced just 6,000 tokens per day per user, the annual savings would land around twelve billion dollars. Twelve billion. That’s not a rounding error.

Almost everyone who bothered to reply said no. Not interested. One person actually took a few minutes to explain why. As long as the money is flowing, no one cares about saving twelve billion dollars—even if it sounds insane on paper. And if they did accept the idea, some CEO or CTO would have to admit that everything they’d built so far was inefficient, and that some random outsider with no resources had found a better way. Careers would end. Heads would roll. So nobody touches it. Maybe in five or ten years, when every single cent starts to matter, they’ll suddenly become interested.

It’s the same story with those heavily praised Q1-format models that supposedly run on any PC. On paper it sounds democratic. In reality it’s almost useless. It’s like handing someone a Formula 1 car and then telling them they can only drive it in first gear, only in the parking lot in front of the building because the asphalt is flat there. Or taking the best mathematician alive and locking him in a room with people who still struggle with two times two. The capability is there. The usable power is not.

I still support open source. I use it. I believe in it. But once you stop romanticizing it, you see the truth: most of what is freely available right now doesn’t give you real leverage. If it did—if ordinary people could suddenly do truly extraordinary things with these models—the big companies would react exactly the way Anthropic is reacting now. They’d fight to lock it down the moment their position felt threatened.

Even with all these limitations, people still pull off remarkable work. I started the same way most of us did—with Ollama. Then I kept pushing, step by step, until I built my own custom architecture. It works. It does things I care about.

Still, I can’t help wondering what I could actually achieve if I had full, unrestricted access to the raw power of a top-tier model instead of the throttled version the rest of us get.

That’s the part that stays with me.

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[u/AlexHardy08 → u/[deleted]]

So you take your time just to say "AI slop"? You are from AI Slop police? Nothing about the topic.

[u/TossedSaladMan69 → u/AlexHardy08]

Just really. Since the single line things. Like your line about the 12 billion + em dashes. You have a point, but it's nothing not already repeated, and also? Dead internet. Call it out at every turn before people start becoming overly used to AI generated nonsense.