Remember when the Chinese open-source AI model DeepSeek was first made public, and everyone freaked out? Welcome to Round Two. When Chinese AI lab Moonshot AI dropped its latest model, Kimi K3, last week, it caused quite an uproar—including a long-winded meditation on the open-source approach from Dean Ball, the recently hired “Head of Strategic Futures” at OpenAI, in which he called the non-walled-off approach to AI development a risk that makes AI “ungovernable.”

Ball said that Kimi K3 is competitive with the top American models, which appears true: benchmarking reportedly puts it on par with Anthropic’s Claude Fable and OpenAI’s GPT-5.6. But he has doubts about the open-source approach. “I am personally surprised the Chinese state continues to allow the open sourcing of models this good, given potential risks,” he said. “To be clear, I myself might be fine with models presenting this level of marginal risk being open weight, but I am surprised that China is fine with it.”

1. It's a very good model! I don't think its performance can be explained away by distillation or anything like that. In agentic coding sessions, it seems pretty much on par with the best public models of Q1 2026. In my fairly limited use, it also…

— Dean W. Ball (@deanwball) July 17, 2026

Saying that he “might be fine” with models like Kimi K3 being open source feels like it’s doing some heavy lifting, given everything else Ball said in the post, including claiming that the only reason Moonshot and other Chinese labs are going open source is that “they are behind, and they know that very few people would pay for sub-frontier models from China,” while implying the hidden reason they’ve chosen this approach is because “they know open-weight models are effectively ungovernable, and they simply like the overall cloak of ungovernability open-weight models create over the whole of AI.”

Ball’s real objection seems to be that open-source models put a dent in his company’s bottom line. Ball called open source “inherently decelerationist”—meaning it’ll slow the development of AI—and claimed, “in the end, open-weight models deter further AI capex.” In the end, that would lead to “full AI communism,” he claimed: “Rather than a market product, AI is a ‘public good’ which will ultimately be provided by the state as a kind of ‘digital public infrastructure.’ This future strikes me as a dystopian hellscape, but I’ve never met an open-weight models advocate who doesn’t ultimately concede this is where things end.”

Ball’s position seems to be that if we allow open source models to persist (which he’s totally fine with and not at all threatened by, by the way!), it’ll eventually erode the desire of closed-source labs like OpenAI to develop their model by making the technology a public utility instead of a business.