The written record
“We need to ensure America has leading open models founded on American values.”
— America's AI Action Plan · July 2025
This is not advocacy. It is the stated policy of the United States, being operationalized through the American AI Export Program under the Department of Commerce. What follows is the case for that policy, argued by the leaders who set it — and the strongest objection, answered.
Part one · The case, in their words
Why the Nation chose open.
The argument for open models is not fringe advocacy. It is made, on the record, by the officials who set national policy and the companies that ship the models.
“The United States' advantage is decentralized and open innovation … constraining American innovation to closed development increases the chance that we don't lead at all.”
Mark Zuckerberg · Open Source AI Is the Path Forward · 2024
Backed by action: Meta shipped Llama and made it available to U.S. defense and intelligence.
Read the source →Part two · The distinction that guts the marketing
Open weights are not open.
“A fully open model, as opposed to just an 'open weights' model, comes with data, training code, logs, and decision making — on top of the weights to run inference.”
— Nathan Lambert · The American DeepSeek Project · July 4, 2025
Llama and DeepSeek are open weights: you can run and tune them, but you cannot rebuild or fully verify them. Lambert ships OLMo and Tülu at Ai2 — genuinely open American models, released with data, code, logs, and checkpoints, not weights alone. The rare patriotic-open voice backed by a shipped model, not a manifesto.
Run and fine-tune on your own hardware — but the recipe is withheld. You can probe it; you cannot rebuild or fully verify it.
- ✓Run it yourself
- ✓Fine-tune it
- ✓Inspect the weights
- ✕Rebuild from scratch
Lambert's warning is blunt: “This is a world where the most available models are the hardest to trust.” His answer — the American DeepSeek Project — is to make the fully-open, reproducible model the American default.
Read the source →Part three · The mandate
Open, transparent, and true to the Republic.
The record is united. America's future runs on open models, founded on American values — and a model the people can inspect is the only kind a republic can trust with its work. Openness makes accountability possible; transparency makes it real; American values make it ours.
Republic Assay is the instrument that holds every model to that standard — in public, so the claim can always be checked.