DeepSeek’s open source movement

DeepSeek may have originated in China, but it stopped being Chinese the minute it was released on Hugging Face with an accompanying paper detailing its development. Soon after, a range of developers, including the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI), scrambled to replicate DeepSeek’s success but this time as open source software. BAAI, for its part, launched OpenSeek, an ambitious effort to take DeepSeek’s open-weight models and create a project that surpasses DeepSeek while uniting “the global open source communities to drive collaborative innovation in algorithms, data, and systems.” If that sounds cool to you, it didn’t to the U.S. government, which promptly put BAAI on its “baddie” list. Someone needs to remind U.S. (and global) policymakers that no single country, company, or government can contain community-driven open source.

The moment that keeps on going

It’s increasingly common in AI circles to refer to the “DeepSeek moment,” but calling it a moment fundamentally misunderstands its significance. DeepSeek didn’t just have a moment. It’s now very much a movement, one that will frustrate all efforts to contain it. DeepSeek, and the open source AI ecosystem surrounding it, has rapidly evolved from a brief snapshot of technological brilliance into something much bigger—and much harder to stop. Tens of thousands of developers, from seasoned researchers to passionate hobbyists, are now working on enhancing, tuning, and extending these open source models in ways no centralized entity could manage alone.

For example, it’s perhaps not surprising that Hugging Face is actively attempting to reverse engineer and publicly disseminate DeepSeek’s R1 model. Hugging Face, while important, is just one company, just one platform. But Hugging Face has attracted hundreds of thousands of developers who actively contribute to, adapt, and build on open source models, driving AI innovation at a speed and scale unmatched even by the most agile corporate labs.

Hugging Face by itself could be stopped. But the communities it enables and accelerates cannot.

Through the influence of Hugging Face and many others, variants of DeepSeek models are already finding their way into a wide range of applications. Companies like Perplexity are embedding these powerful open source models into consumer-facing services, proving their real-world utility. This democratization of technology ensures that cutting-edge AI capabilities are no longer locked behind the walls of large corporations or elite government labs but are instead openly accessible, adaptable, and improvable by a global community.

It’s Linux all over again

In many respects, the rise of open source AI mirrors the trajectory of Linux from decades past. What started as the passion project of a lone developer quickly blossomed into an essential, foundational technology embraced by enterprises worldwide. Linux won not because it had superior backing from governments or major corporations, though it eventually earned both. No, Linux initially won out precisely because it captivated developers who embraced its promise and contributed toward its potential. Its inherent openness enabled rapid, organic growth driven by practical necessity and persistent innovation from a dedicated global community.

We are witnessing a similar phenomenon with DeepSeek and the broader open source AI ecosystem, but this time it’s happening much, much faster. AI adoption and innovation cycles now run in weeks and months rather than the years and decades typical of previous technology revolutions. Organizations that cling to proprietary approaches (looking at you, OpenAI!) or attempt to exert control through restrictive policies (you again, OpenAI!) are not just swimming upstream—they’re attempting to dam an ocean. (Yes, OpenAI has now started to talk up open source, but it’s a long way from releasing a DeepSeek/OpenSeek equivalent on GitHub.)

You can’t stop us now

This brings us to policymakers and the role governments imagine they can play. The current geopolitical approach to AI governance—epitomized by the restrictions imposed on BAAI—is at best shortsighted, and at worst, actively harmful. Open source isn’t subject to export controls or trade embargoes. It’s a pull request away, all day every day. Trying to block or slow the open source AI movement through policy edicts fundamentally misunderstands the decentralized, organic nature of technological evolution itself.

Indeed, the war between countries and corporations to dominate AI is already over. It’s too soon to say that open source AI has won (most models we regularly use are proprietary), but directionally, all signs point to open source. That said, it remains to be seen just how open the big players are willing to be: Meta’s Llama 4, for example, is exceptionally impressive but Meta seems determined to stick to its “open enough” licensing stance.

The recent history of technology underscores why policy-driven containment strategies inevitably fail. Open source ecosystems operate as living organisms, continuously mutating and adapting. Unlike centralized corporate projects, open source initiatives such as OpenSeek rapidly evolve, leveraging global collaboration at scale. Innovations that might take years in closed environments often happen within weeks when code, ideas, and data flow freely.

AI policymakers would do well to understand this dynamic sooner rather than later. Restrictive policies won’t just fail to halt the spread of open source AI; they’ll inadvertently harm domestic companies and push innovation—and critical technological leadership—away. (President Trump is madly attempting to shift the balance of AI innovation away from the U.S. with tariffs that threaten to halt AI infrastructure spending by Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta, among others.)

The unstoppable nature of the open source AI movement—exemplified by DeepSeek and its global progeny—signifies a profound shift in technological development. No one can own this wave, no one can stop it, and no one can contain it. Embrace it, shape it, contribute to it, or risk being left behind. Open source AI isn’t just the future; it’s already reshaping the present.