Mozilla’s CTO thinks AI should be built like the internet
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- Mozilla reported that the performance gap between top open-source models and proprietary systems like Claude and ChatGPT has narrowed to just 3%, and that Alibaba's open-source model Qwen was downloaded more times than the next eight models combined in February 2026.
- Raffi Krikorian, Mozilla's chief technology officer, argued that governments are making a "categorization error" by treating AI as a product instead of infrastructure, saying Washington is lobbying to back "winners" like Anthropic and OpenAI rather than fostering open alternatives.
- Krikorian said enterprise IT and HR workflows are migrating to open models for price-performance reasons, and that regulated industries want full data control and the ability to self-host within their own firewall.
- Krikorian acknowledged that many leading open-source models are Chinese and said he infers regulatory and trust concerns are why companies don't publicly discuss using them, questioning why American, Indian, or European firms aren't filling that demand.
- Krikorian distinguished true open-source models (full transparency into training data, evaluation, and pre- and post-training) from open-weight models (downloadable, runnable, fine-tunable), and said the technology for fine-tuning still needs to be accessible beyond computer scientists.
- Meta released a new open-weight model on August 10, adding momentum to the open AI debate, and Krikorian predicted the biggest AI company of 2031 will be a services provider offering customizable open intelligence similar to Google Drive or Microsoft Office 365.
Why it matters: The 3% performance gap and Qwen's download dominance suggest enterprise demand for open-weight AI is real and growing — but Krikorian says Washington is lobbying for proprietary "winners" instead of enabling U.S. or European providers to fill global demand, risking a future where Chinese models dominate the open ecosystem.
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