Cheap open‑source frontier AI shifts economics

When an open‑source model reaches near‑frontier performance at a small fraction of incumbent API costs, it collapses the deployment cost barrier for advanced applications and incentivizes a wave of commercialization, forks, and decentralized hosting. That dynamic makes advanced AI cheaper to run in many markets, changes vendor lock‑in calculus, and forces policymakers and firms to rethink export controls, infrastructure (data‑center, GPU/DRAM), and safety governance. — Lowering the price of near‑frontier models under permissive licenses alters who can afford to run advanced AI and thus reshapes competitive, regulatory, and security debates about AI deployment and control.