Open-Source 2.0: The Geopolitics of AI Models and Chips

Open-source has been viewed as a cultural choice for many years. It was a philosophy that some developers gravitated toward because it felt collaborative and egalitarian. But in the 2025 AI landscape, open-source is not a feel-good hobbyist movement anymore, it is a geopolitical lever. Nations have realised that closed-model dependency means technological dependency.

Models as National Infrastructure

Governments are now treating foundation models the way they treated telecom infrastructure, satellite capability and strategic natural resources decades ago. A country that relies on externally-owned closed models has limited resilience because model governance, update cycles and access policies are controlled elsewhere. This is why national open-model initiatives are appearing from Tokyo to Abu Dhabi, from Singapore to France.

The goal is not to compete with top-end commercial labs on parameter count. Instead, the goal is to ensure that critical sectors like defence analytics, healthcare inference, trade intelligence, public safety and citizen services can run on models that are inspectable, modifiable and locally accountable.

Semiconductors Become Political Instruments

Open-source at the model layer only matters if the hardware layer is also accessible. And this is where geopolitics intensifies further. Chips, especially AI accelerators, have become bargaining tools in diplomatic conversations.

Export restrictions, fab capacity constraints, lithography choke-points and foundry alliances shape national AI capabilities more than research papers do. Countries investing in open silicon (RISC-V ecosystems), custom domain-specific accelerators and modular chiplet standards are both “pushing innovation” and hedging against supply capture, making hardware independence a defensive strategy.

The Economic Logic Behind Open-Source Power

Open-source models and open silicon reduce switching costs. They create multi-vendor ecosystems. They enable local startups to build without being beholden to a single API or licensing arrangement. And they allow smaller markets to create economic leverage.

This is anti-fragility instead of being anti-corporate. In Open-Source 2.0, the value is in making everything forkable. The ability to adapt, localise, compress, fine-tune and deploy without asking for permission becomes a source of national negotiation strength.

A New Era of Alliances, not Adoption

This shift is also rewriting alliances. Countries are now partnering both on defence or trade as well as open-model stacks. Just that, instead of formal treaties and military pacts, there will be shared frameworks for identity, trust and compute governance.

Conclusion

Open-source is becoming a geopolitical map, not a GitHub preference. The countries that take open-source seriously are romanticising collaboration and future-proofing their strategic autonomy. In a world where AI defines economic strength, open ecosystems create resilience, bargaining power and technological continuity. Open-Source 2.0 is not about free software, it is about who gets to shape the rules of intelligence itself.