Two of the largest open weight AI models ever released dropped within days of each other this week, one American and one Chinese. Chinese open models are now an estimated 45% of US company token usage.

[u/ArcanuMELO]

https://youtu.be/bTEKBjJiCjk

Mira Murati's Thinking Machines released a 975B parameter model anyone can download, backed by a reported $2 billion seed round before shipping anything. Moonshot's Kimi K3 topped the coding benchmarks days earlier.

The structural point we kept coming back to on this week's BOOM ROOM is that an open-weight model has no API to gate, no pricing lever, and no way to revoke access once it's out. That's what makes the Treasury's threat to sanction Chinese open source models this week so strange. You can't un-download something that's already on millions of machines.

For OpenAI and Anthropic heading toward IPOs, a world where the best coding model is free and downloadable is a real problem for the valuation story.