A timeless rule of competition: commoditize your complement. Every product has complements. When a complement gets cheaper, demand for your product can rise. So companies often try to drive the price of key complements toward zero. Open-weighting a model is basically this move at a frontier scale. OpenAI and Anthropic position the AI model itself as the product you pay for. For Meta, dependence on a model layer controlled by competitors would threaten its ability to profit from its own AI products. So Meta gave Llama for free. They can afford to give away the model because they don’t have to sell it. Instead, they sell advertising to 3B users. The model is Meta's complement, while its data and distribution are the moat. Once you start to see the pattern, other open-model releases become more clear: - Google (Gemma) and Microsoft (Phi) sell cloud computing and software. A cheap model layer sends more workloads to their clouds. - OpenAI (gpt-oss): When open competitors set the price, you release something open too. - Nvidia agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12.9B, preserving openness and support for competing hardware and cloud providers. Making models more accessible encourages more applications and greater usage, which expands demand for computing infrastructure. Essentially, companies open up one layer when doing so strengthens the part of the stack where they make money. For companies whose only business is selling access to closed frontier models, cheaper and more capable open-weight models mean more competition at the model layer and more pressure on token pricing.