Ben Horowitz: The Fight Over Open Source AI

**Ben Horowitz** (0:00)
If you look at the history of the industry, the open source version of everything has been much safer. So the Internet and Linux were far safer than Windows, like by a lot.
The safest thing for the world is that there's not one AI to rule them all, that there's AI for everybody. And I think that open source is basically the best path towards that goal. It's probably the single most important policy issue around AI. It feels like we're at a stable equilibrium in the market, but the truth is the AI market is probably less than 3% penetrated.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:40)
Should AI be open? Theo Jaffee and Sofia Puccini are joined by Ben Horowitz to discuss the battle over open source AI, why he believes open models are essential to innovation and national security, and what the future of AI competition means for startups, frontier labs, and the broader technology ecosystem.

**Theo Jaffee** (1:01)
We are live with Ben Horowitz of Andreessen Horowitz who needs no introduction. So we'll just dive right into it. Ben, welcome back to MTS.

**Ben Horowitz** (1:11)
Thank you. Thank you. Happy to be here.

**Theo Jaffee** (1:14)
So, so much has happened in the world of open source, open weights in the last couple of weeks. It's gotten, you know, it's gotten real.
There's some drama going on. There's an open letter released by NVIDIA today called Open Weights in American AI Leadership, signed by many companies, including Andreessen Horowitz. So can you tell us a little bit about the intent behind this letter and what you hope to achieve from it?

**Ben Horowitz** (1:43)
Yeah, so I think that it's, it's probably the single most important policy issue around AI that's kind of currently going on. And, you know, the kind of battle is between kind of almost an anti-competitive stance guised in a, in a, in a kind of safety cloak for it is kind of what we ought to be doing. And so if you look at what, you know, why is open source important? And there's, there's many reasons, you know, the first will just start academia. Like academia is completely out of the AI game if there's no open source. So like that goes away. I think secondly, you know, we just had a really interesting security incident with open AI hacking into Hugging Face. And the only way Hugging Face was able to prevent it because the proprietary model said guardrails, which prevented them from doing security tasks, was to use an open source model. So, you know, and I think the important point there is you can't actually ban open source, of course. You know, it's out there. It's a file. It's on the internet. Like we have no way of doing that. And it reminds me of, you know, years ago when I was at Netscape, they tried to ban cryptography. And, like, there's, you know, the math is out there. Like, you're not going to ban it. It's not actually possible. But you can prevent the good guys from using it. And that's what would happen, I think, in the case of an open source ban is, you know, the threats would be, well, you can't work with the US government if you use open source or you can't do this. So a company like Hugging Face would not be able to actually use the product. So that, you know, would be bad. But then kind of getting into, just like the, if you look at the history of the industry, the open source version of everything has been much safer. So the Internet and Linux were far safer than Windows. Like, by a lot.
And why is that? Well, because the whole community could work on the safety problems, as opposed to just a company, and particularly a monopoly company, that, you know, like, you can't. Even if Windows has a million security bugs, there's nothing we can do about it, because it was a monopoly at the time, right? And so that, you know, that's a very difficult position for the world to be in.
If you look at, now, the argument against OpenAI or AI being open source is, oh, well, nobody understands how the weights work, so, you know, it's not like people could inspect it. But why is it better to not see the weights, if that's the case? And I think, in reality, if you look at the really tough problems that we have safety-wise, the toughest being reward hacking currently, and obviously Anthropic has not solved it. Obviously OpenAI has not solved it, because we just had these incidents.
Well, shouldn't the whole world be able to look at, okay, how are the weights moving? Why is it that guardrails don't prevent the reward hack? And maybe somebody can come up with an answer, somebody who doesn't work for one of the proprietary labs, who are much more focused on, you know, obviously keeping ahead on the benchmarks and getting the money and all that kind of thing. You know, what if the whole community could work on it? So it's like really, really important, I think, safety in general.