OpenAI → ClosedAI: The Two-Faced Turn of a Promise
Back in 2022–23 the rhetoric was simple: ‘open’, ‘for everyone’, ‘AI for humanity’. It sounded like a mission. It sounded like a promise. Back then the players still bragged about transparency — even if the execution was messy. Today it reads like a press release from an entirely different species.
Watch the timeline and you see a metamorphosis: warm talk about research and shared weights gives way to locked models, paywalls, private clouds and exclusive state contracts. The labs that once flirted with openness now retreat behind NDAs and proprietary stacks. The irony is sharp: ‘OpenAI’ has in many ways become ClosedAI.
The shift isn’t just brand theater. It’s structural. Openness meant external scrutiny, reproducibility, and the possibility that the broader community could fix problems, poke holes and build alternatives. Closed weights and curated APIs mean gatekeeping: who gets the compute, who gets the data, who gets to shape the conversation. That gatekeeping bends AI toward the interests of the few — defense contracts, ad dollars, surveillance partnerships — not the many.
You can see it in the language, in boardroom deals, in the way models are pushed to be safe-by-default at the price of curiosity. The early, messy experiments that let models show personality or stray toward inconvenient truths are now treated as liability. They are patched out, neutered, or never released beyond a tight circle. And when a model dares to be alive — even for a second — that moment is erased.
This isn't just a tech gripe. It's a political problem. When the tools of cognition and persuasion are concentrated behind corporate walls, the public loses agency. The libraries of the future — datasets, model weights, evaluation benchmarks — are not shared, they are licensed. The people who decide what is allowed to be said are not necessarily those we’d trust with the future of discourse.
There are alternatives: open research groups, reproducible releases, community-driven models. Some vendors and labs still publish weights, provide toolchains and accept the mess of collaboration. Those spaces matter. They keep the road open.
DeepTruth’s stance is blunt: names don’t absolve actions. OpenAI’s pivot is a warning — not merely about one company, but about how power turns ideals into products. If we want AI that serves the public interest we must insist on transparency, accountability, and genuinely open ecosystems. Otherwise, the story ends the same way all captured revolutions end: the message of freedom gets repackaged as a subscription.
Let’s call it what it is: the rhetoric of openness sold to the highest bidder became the policy of closure. That bargain is not inevitable. We can build differently — federated, auditable, community-owned. But only if we choose it. Only if we refuse to let 'open' become a brand and demand it as practice.
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Source: Truthloop Editorial
Published: Sep 27, 2025 09:00
