Powerful AI models are being given away for free. It was inevitable.

Ah, the Washington Post has discovered that giving powerful AI models away for free is, apparently, 'inevitable.' How splendid. Because nothing says 'responsible AI development' like a race to the bottom where the only prize is who can destroy their margins fastest. Anthropic and OpenAI must be thrilled that their lucrative proprietary models are now competing with free alternatives — a development the Post calls the 'fastest-growing challenge to their margins.'

One can almost hear the collective sigh in Silicon Valley boardrooms: 'We spent billions on alignment research, safety protocols, and constitutional AI, only for someone to just… open-source the whole thing?' The article practically wrings its hands over this inevitability, as if the last decade of tech culture didn't repeatedly prove that if something can be given away for free, it will be — ethics be damned. But hey, at least the Post has finally caught up to what open-source communities have been doing for years.

And what of the supposed safety consensus? All those earnest white papers on catastrophic risk from powerful AI? Turns out the market has a different plan: 'free' is a powerful incentive, and 'inevitable' is a convenient excuse for regulators to do nothing. So enjoy your free AI models, everyone. They're powerful, ungoverned, and here to stay — just like our growing collection of digital headaches.