OpenAI executive calls Open AI models ‘AI communism’, sparks Backlash

On July 17, OpenAI’s Head of Strategic Futures, Dean Ball, who referenced his own recent stint inside the US government on AI policy, published a post on X reacting to the release of Moonshot AI’s Kimi model, which has been breaking several key benchmarks.

Some of the arguments made by Ball in his viral post were:

• Open-source models are “AI communism, leading to a dystopian hellscape”: “One probable outcome of an open-weight-model-dominant world is full AI communism, which is precisely what China proposes: rather than a market product, AI is a ‘public good’ that will ultimately be provided by the state as a kind of ‘digital public infrastructure.’ This future strikes me as a dystopian hellscape.”
• China is foolish to open-source such a competent model: “I am personally surprised the Chinese state continues to allow the open sourcing of models this good, given potential risks.” He attributes this “75%” to “strategic blindness/lack of AGI-pilledness (the CCP is very Yann Lecun-y in its views of AI),” Companies may open-source, he argued, “partially ideological and partially because they are behind, and they know that very few people would pay for sub-frontier models from China.”
• Kimi is genuinely good, and not a knock-off, but maybe not cheap: “It’s a very good model! I don’t think its performance can be explained away by distillation or anything like that.” He added that, in his own use, “it also seemed very token hungry. It’s not obvious to me that this model is actually that cheap to run.”
• Open weights are “decelerationist”: “Open-weight models are inherently decelerationist, and I’m continually surprised to see the so-called ‘accelerationists’ so excited about open-weight models.” He suggested that the appeal is that such models are “effectively ungovernable,” invoking James C. Scott’s ideas, particularly from The Art of Not Being Governed. He further argued that “in the end, open-weight models deter further AI capex.”
• The US government should strengthen regulation, not impose a ban: “I would guess that the Trump administration will, at some point, realise that its best strategy here would be to create large amounts of regulatory risk around the use of open-weight Chinese models. You don’t need to ‘ban open source’ (one of the dumber motifs of AI policy discussion). You just need to direct every agency to issue soft law that creates FUD.” As an illustration, he proposed a hypothetical “Federal Reserve Advisory Bulletin” warning of “backdoors in Chinese AI models,” adding: “It needn’t be that well justified.”
• The danger is real but invisible for now: “It’s probably true that open-weight models of this capability make the world a bit more dangerous, but not so much more that you’ll really notice. At some point, the models will be capable enough that you will notice.”

According to Mozilla’s State of Open…