Top US tech companies are holding developers in closed-source AI ecosystems, Ant Group says (www.techradar.com)

Chinese fintech giant Ant Group has accused US tech leaders — notably Nvidia, OpenAI and Google — of “fake” open-sourcing: releasing frameworks and toolchains that appear open but are effectively engineered to lock developers into proprietary stacks. Ant points to Nvidia’s Dynamo (open-sourced in March 2024) as an “OS of AI” that’s heavily optimized for Nvidia GPUs, and to agent frameworks from OpenAI and Google that are tailored to their own models, limiting portability. The report contrasts this approach with Chinese firms like Alibaba Cloud and ByteDance, which have open-sourced full models and seen broader adoption, including by some US startups. Ant also flags concentration risks: Microsoft holds ~39% of the foundation model/model-management market and Nvidia ~92% of data-center GPUs, while global open-source contributions are dominated by the US (37.4%) and China (18.7%). For the AI/ML community the debate matters because “open-source” manners affect reproducibility, competition and infrastructure choices. Tool- and framework-focused openness can still produce vendor lock-in if performance optimizations favor specific hardware or proprietary models, nudging enterprises to buy certain GPUs or cloud services. Conversely, releasing full models boosts transparency, reproducibility and cheaper experimentation but still depends on costly accelerators and raises dual-use risks. Ant’s critique reframes open-source strategy as a geopolitical and market-power lever, not just a technical or ethical choice.