Corporate America Is Getting Hooked on Open-Source A.I.

Companies like AT&T are increasingly using cheap, freely available artificial intelligence models over expensive ones from Anthropic and OpenAI.

AT&T turned to artificial intelligence models from Anthropic and OpenAI in recent years to help with customer service, call transcription and coding. The A.I. models charged fees and were “closed,” which meant the A.I. companies did not share their underlying code.

This year, AT&T changed course.

As A.I. costs skyrocketed, Andy Markus, the company’s chief data and A.I. officer, looked for cheaper alternatives. He landed on “open” models, which can be downloaded and modified without payment or approval.

By May, open models accounted for 20 percent of AT&T’s A.I. use. That has since risen to 40 percent and may jump to 60 percent in the coming months, Mr. Markus said in an interview.

“We believe it could go much, much higher,” he said, adding that AT&T was saving up to 80 percent on A.I. costs compared with earlier this year.

Open-source artificial intelligence has become all the rage in corporate America. Like AT&T, companies such as Airbnb and Deloitte are also turning to open A.I. models that are easy to customize and cheaper to use. Last month, open models accounted for 58 percent of A.I. use, up from 10 percent a year ago, according to U.S. user data from OpenRouter, a platform that lets people choose different A.I. models to complete tasks.

On Thursday, the chip maker Nvidia announced it was buying Hugging Face, a library of open A.I. models, for $12.9 billion, another sign of the technology’s importance.

“Together, we will make A.I. more open, more capable and more accessible to people and institutions around the world,” Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s chief executive, said.

Open models come in two flavors. One is an open-source model, which makes its underlying code public. The other is an open-weights model, which makes its “weights” — the numerical calculations that determine how the model reasons — public.

Many of the most popular open A.I. models are made by Chinese companies like Moonshot AI, DeepSeek and Alibaba. Rather than spending millions in fees to use a closed model, developers can download one of the Chinese systems and build their products on top of it, paying mainly for servers. OpenAI and Anthropic charge for subscriptions and other fees, depending on the job.

Some Chinese open models are now 80 percent to 90 percent as powerful as those from OpenAI and Anthropic, while costing as little as 20 percent of the price, said Jerry Tang, the chief executive of Atlas Cloud, a start-up that provides access to various A.I. models. He compared the leading models from OpenAI and Anthropic to pricey sports cars — powerful, but not always necessary.

- Author: Eli Tan, The New York Times

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