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Late last month, Anthropic released a report arguing that the model GLM-5.3 poses a major cyberattack risk. The report’s core concern is that the powerful new model, released in August by the Chinese company Z.ai, is freely available for anyone to download and modify. Anthropic’s assertion is only the latest move in a long-running debate about whether frontier AI models should be made open, like GLM-5.3, or should stay locked behind the doors of the frontier labs. 

These days, much of the debate about how to handle open models is playing out in public—and there’s a lot of money resting on its outcome. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who has a lot to gain if people continue buying their own hardware to run open models, advocates enthusiastically for the United States to develop more of them, whereas Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, who runs a company that could be undermined by cheap, powerful models, advocates for a more cautious approach. But beneath all these commercial incentives, there is real substance to disagreements about open models.

“I think a lot of the way you come down on the openness debate is influenced by how you come down on the AI debate,” says David Gray Widder, an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin School of Information. Those who are concerned about AI safety warn that open models can easily be misused by bad actors, whereas those who focus more on AI’s practical potential urge that this power should not sit behind the closed doors of just a few big companies, and that open models could help spread it more widely.

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