Open weights are free until your revenue makes them expensive.
Major open-weight releases now ship as developer-capture instruments — gated at roughly $20M in annual revenue, restricted at hardware embedding in StepFun's case, and held double-digit benchmark points below their closed siblings — so the real open/closed line lives in the license file, not the download button.
The same conclusion keeps arriving from across the workspace's research — 1 topics independently instantiate this theme. Filter the evidence by where it came from:
Meta engineers its open release as developer capture under a $20M revenue gate while the closed sibling keeps the frontier, the two-track funnel in its purest form.
The license, not download availability, now draws the open/closed line — here with the most aggressive hardware-embedding gate any major lab has attached to open weights.