Open weights and AI for all

AI’s next frontier isn’t just about capability—it’s about who gets to use it. Our mission to put AI in the hands of as many people as possible is what drives us. Today’s release of our most capable  open-weights models is a major step forward that makes advanced AI more open, flexible, and accessible worldwide. It’s part of our broader effort to ensure AI is available to the many and not concentrated in the hands of the few. That’s why we’re integrating these models into both our OpenAI for Countries initiative and our nonprofit's support for groups on the frontlines of their communities.

OpenAI for Countries helps our allies and partners build AI infrastructure rooted in democratic values. By offering these models to governments, we’re supporting the global buildout of AI on US-led rails—enabling nations to tap into AI-driven economic growth, innovation, and opportunity. For swing states, the availability of powerful open-weight models will be an incentive to build on democratic AI and not autocratic AI.

And by offering it through our own nonprofit to grantees across the country, we’ll be equipping nonprofits to use these models to scale their impact and serve more people.

There are our most advanced open-weight reasoning models, which can handle advanced problem-solving and are adaptable to many tasks. They give anyone—from individual developers and local nonprofits, to large enterprises and governments—the freedom to run and customize AI on their own infrastructure, democratizing access to AI across industries, communities, and countries globally. These models also lowers barriers for emerging markets, resource-constrained sectors, and smaller organizations. With the right tools in their hands, people can build, innovate, and unlock new opportunities.

Open models also create a powerful network effect for advancing US-led democratic AI. When many developers use and improve the same tools, every contribution—new integrations, fine-tunes, or performance improvements—benefits the whole community. It’s the same reason that Linux runs a major share of the world’s servers: open-source collaboration ensures that the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts. Just as science advances through incremental contributions that build toward major breakthroughs, shared AI tools let the best ideas emerge faster and reach more people.

There is also a strategic dimension. The country that produces the most widely adopted AI models shapes the global standards that others follow. Choosing to build on models developed in the US is effectively a bet on American innovation and values. In the Intelligence Age, AI models are a form of soft power: when governments and companies adopt US-origin models, they’re choosing an ecosystem rooted in reliability, transparency, and democratic norms.

The White House’s new AI Action Plan rightly emphasizes that open-weight models can strengthen America’s AI leadership, support academic research, and expand across industry and government. Our open-weights models are designed to meet that moment: to align with US policy priorities that have broad support across the political spectrum while giving developers everywhere the freedom to innovate on their own terms.

This has been a consistent theme in our work. As we noted in our March submission⁠(opens in a new window) to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy to help inform the new AI Action Plan: “We believe the question of whether AI should be open or closed source is a false choice—we need both, and they can work in a complementary way that encourages the building of AI on American rails.”

Open models also create new opportunities for governments and institutions with strict data-residency or security requirements. In places where data cannot leave the country and using a third party cloud service isn’t possible, open-weight models can provide a secure and flexible way to harness advanced AI while keeping sensitive information under local control.

The release continues a history of OpenAI releasing open source models, including Whisper⁠, GPT‑2⁠, and CLIP⁠. It will build the next generation of AI infrastructure on democratic rails—models rooted in openness, intellectual freedom, and broad access. Through OpenAI for Countries and our nonprofit, these models will bring us closer to a world where the benefits of AI reach more people, nations of all sizes participate in the AI economy, and innovation anywhere lifts communities everywhere.