Alphabet Inc. pays Samsung Electronics Co. an “enormous sum of money” every month to preinstall Google generative AI app, Gemini, on its phones and devices, according to court testimony, even though the company’s practice of paying for installations has twice been found to violate the law.
This paper examines ‘open’ artificial intelligence (AI). Claims about ‘open’ AI often lack precision, frequently eliding scrutiny of substantial industry concentration in large-scale AI development and deployment, and often incorrectly applying understandings of ‘open’ imported from free and open-source software to AI systems. At present, powerful actors are seeking to shape policy using claims that ‘open’ AI is either beneficial to innovation and democracy, on the one hand, or detrimental to safety, on the other. When policy is being shaped, definitions matter. To add clarity to this debate, we examine the basis for claims of openness in AI, and offer a material analysis of what AI is and what ‘openness’ in AI can and cannot provide: examining models, data, labour, frameworks, and computational power. We highlight three main affordances of ‘open’ AI, namely transparency, reusability, and extensibility, and we observe that maximally ‘open’ AI allows some forms of oversight and experimentation on top of existing models. However, we find that openness alone does not perturb the concentration of power in AI. Just as many traditional open-source software projects were co-opted in various ways by large technology companies, we show how rhetoric around ‘open’ AI is frequently wielded in ways that exacerbate rather than reduce concentration of power in the AI sector.