In February 2026, Roelof Botha traveled to Washington, D.C. and participated in the bipartisan Hill and Valley Forum to discuss AI policy with lawmakers. In a podcast interview around the same time, he argued that AI policy should focus on regulating applications rather than 'basic technology,' comparing regulation of foundational AI models to regulating electricity or combustion engines in the abstract, and said Europe 'may be going more aggressively in this direction than it should.' He also said he is a 'staunch supporter' of open-source AI, citing competition with Chinese open-source models. Botha's position was not blanket anti-regulation -- he said 'reasonable regulation allows our country to thrive' and pointed to fair-lending rules as an example of appropriate application-level oversight -- but the thrust of his advocacy was to narrow the scope of regulatory oversight applied to frontier AI models themselves.
The Wikimedia Foundation announced commercial partnerships through Wikimedia Enterprise with Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Mistral AI, and Perplexity for structured API access to Wikipedia data for AI training. This formalizes relationships that previously involved unpaid scraping, creating a sustainable revenue model.
Broadcom's VMware Cloud Foundation division donated Velero, an open-source Kubernetes backup and disaster-recovery tool originally created by Heptio (acquired by VMware in 2018), to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation Sandbox. The donation moves the project from vendor control to neutral, community-run governance. Broadcom is separately recognized as a top-five long-term contributor to CNCF projects overall, with maintainers active on etcd, Cluster API, Harbor, Antrea, and containerd.
Baidu released its ERNIE 4.5 large language model as open source in June 2025, making advanced AI technology freely available to developers and researchers.
In April 2025, former Y Combinator president Geoff Ralston launched the Safe Artificial Intelligence Fund (SAIF), specifically seeking startups that enhance AI safety, security, and responsible deployment. The fund writes $100,000 checks as SAFE notes with a $10M cap. Ralston explicitly stated he would not back fully autonomous weapons, saying 'There are certainly uses of AI which would (will) be unsafe: using the technology to create bioweapons, to manage conventional weapons without a human in the loop.' Additionally, YC has funded 152+ open source startups including Ollama (105K+ GitHub stars).
Perplexity released pplx-kernels, a library of GPU communication kernels for mixture-of-experts (MoE) model inference, as open-source software under the permissive MIT license, publishing the code on GitHub with an accompanying engineering blog post. Perplexity states the library achieves substantially faster all-to-all communication than standard primitives and supports multiple hardware transports (NVLink, IBGDA, IBRC, AWS EFA). The repository has drawn outside contributors and underpins a published MLSys paper. This is part of a broader, ongoing pattern of Perplexity open-sourcing ML infrastructure under MIT licenses (also including pplx-garden and the pplx-embed embedding models with public technical reports), which is a genuine contribution to the open-source ML ecosystem distinct from the company's product/business controversies.
Ng has consistently argued against broad AI regulation, warning that overregulation could stifle open-source innovation and benefit large incumbents. In January 2025, he expressed disappointment that Congress did not include a moratorium on state-level AI regulation in legislation, arguing that the net impact of proposed regulations was negative. He also criticized the White House Executive Order on AI for using the Defense Production Act framework.
In January 2025, Mullenweg deactivated WordPress.org accounts of several community members, including two planning to fork WordPress and the CEO of the WP Community Collective nonprofit. He also dissolved the WordPress sustainability team after learning it existed. Mullenweg acknowledged the lawsuits 'could potentially bankrupt me or force the closure of WordPress.org.'
Claude is not open source - source code, training datasets, and detailed architecture are not publicly available. Critics note contradiction between touting societal benefits while not open-sourcing most powerful models.
In October 2024, Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman removed 11 Russian nationals from the MAINTAINERS file, citing vague 'compliance requirements.' The Software Freedom Conservancy later argued that the relevant US Executive Order 14071 did not legally require this removal. Critics noted the lack of transparency, the failure to credit removed developers, and the precedent of geopolitics influencing open source contributor access. Linus Torvalds defended the decision.
In 2024, the Tails privacy-focused operating system merged its operations with the Tor Project. Tails, which routes all internet traffic through Tor by default, had been a standalone project since 2009. The merger consolidated two key privacy infrastructure projects under one organizational umbrella, strengthening both.
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In September 2024, Mullenweg publicly attacked WP Engine as a 'cancer to WordPress' and demanded 8% of revenue ($32M) as trademark licensing. When WP Engine declined, he blocked their access to WordPress.org, disrupting over a million websites. He then seized WP Engine's ACF plugin without review. WP Engine sued for extortion, unfair competition, and defamation. A court granted a preliminary injunction restoring WP Engine's access. 159 Automattic employees (8.4%) took buyout packages to leave.
In September 2024, Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg escalated a trademark dispute with WP Engine by publicly calling them a 'cancer to WordPress,' blocking WP Engine's access to WordPress.org resources, and demanding they pay trademark licensing fees. WP Engine sued Automattic. The dispute disrupted the WordPress ecosystem and drew widespread criticism for using control of WordPress.org infrastructure as leverage in a commercial dispute.
In September 2024, Dahl launched a petition to cancel Oracle's trademark on 'JavaScript', gathering over 14,000 signatures. In November 2024, the Deno team filed a formal petition with the USPTO for cancellation, arguing Oracle has not used the trademark in commerce and its control harms the JavaScript community.
On June 26, 2024, SAP published an official Open Source Manifesto, publicly committing to sustained investment in open-source development. SAP holds founding and/or platinum-level membership in the Linux Foundation, Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Eclipse Foundation, Cloud Foundry Foundation, Continuous Delivery Foundation, and OpenAPI Initiative, plus Silver membership in the Apache Software Foundation, and is a major contributor to OpenJDK. SAP maintains multiple actively-used open-source projects including Gardener (Kubernetes-based cluster management, a CNCF project), GardenLinux, OpenUI5 (its web application framework, Apache-2.0 licensed since 2013, ~270 GitHub contributors), Open Resource Discovery, and Open Component Model. In December 2023 SAP also open-sourced its previously proprietary SAP Cloud SDK for Java under Apache-2.0. Per the third-party Open Source Contributor Index (OSCI), which measures active GitHub contributors by company email domain, SAP has ranked among the largest commercial contributors to open source for several years running.
In mid-2024, Yann LeCun vocally opposed California's SB 1047 AI safety bill. He argued that making technology developers liable for bad uses would 'simply stop technology development' and would 'certainly stop the distribution of open source AI platforms, which will kill the entire AI ecosystem.' He called the bill based on an 'illusion of existential risk pushed by a handful of delusional think-tanks' and warned that without open-source AI, 'AI start-ups will just die.'
On March 27, 2024 Databricks released DBRX, a 132-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts large language model, under a permissive open-weight license including commercial use rights. At release DBRX outperformed Llama 2 70B and Mixtral 8x7B on standard benchmarks and was among the largest fully open-weight models of its time. Databricks published the training methodology, evaluation data and tokenizer alongside the weights, contrasting with closed releases from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google.
On March 20, 2024 Redis Inc. announced it was relicensing the Redis project from the permissive BSD license to dual Server Side Public License (SSPL) and Redis Source Available License (RSAL), removing the project from the OSI-approved open source community. The Linux Foundation and major Redis users including AWS, Google Cloud and Oracle responded by forking the project as Valkey within weeks. The move continued the 2018-2024 wave of venture-backed open-source companies (MongoDB, Elastic, HashiCorp, CockroachDB, MariaDB, Redis) pulling licenses back from genuinely open after building community on permissive terms.
In March 2024, xAI released Grok-1 model weights under the Apache 2.0 license, and in August 2025 open-sourced Grok 2.5, with a promise to open-source Grok 3 within six months. Musk positioned this as fulfilling his commitment to open AI development, consistent with his earlier criticism of OpenAI for becoming closed-source. However, AI experts including Bruce Perens (creator of the Open Source Definition) noted that xAI released only model weights, not the training data or training process, making the 'open source' label disputed.
On March 17, 2024, xAI released the complete weights and architecture of Grok-1, their 314 billion parameter Mixture-of-Experts model, under Apache 2.0 license. Musk stated the decision aimed to 'foster innovation and promote accountability and public evaluation' in response to growing demand for transparency in AI. Unlike many proprietary models, Grok-1 provided complete transparency by releasing raw base model weights and network architecture.