(DCNF)—A rising open-source American artificial intelligence (AI) industry seeks to challenge the prevailing narrative that companies and consumers must choose between closed, frontier labs and Chinese alternatives.
Politicians and experts have long focused on the competing spheres of AI development: open-source Chinese and closed, frontier AI labs such as Anthropic and OpenAI. Now, many leading tech companies are launching open-source AI models that give consumers and corporations the benefits of open AI — customization, lower cost and privacy — without relying on Chinese AI.
“We are dying for an American alternative,” Michael Frank, the CEO of Radiant Intel, an AI platform that does geopolitical risk analysis and a visiting AI fellow for the Wilson Center, told the Daily Caller News Foundation in an interview about the need for American open-source AI.
Open-source models are AI systems that can be altered and customized without having to request permission from the AI lab and are often free to use, according to IBM.
“The vast majority of AI deployments are going to be built on open source AI models, and the reason for that is because we’re headed towards the agentic era,” Frank continued, referring to AI “agents” that can perform tasks for the AI user, per IBM.
The growth of the American open-source AI industry may undermine calls for regulation that may ultimately protect the leading, closed-source frontier AI labs such as Anthropic and OpenAI, the Radiant Intel chief executive said.
“That’s the problem with the framing: with China being seen as open source and American frontier AI being closed source, we feel like we have this duty to protect this nest egg, but we shouldn’t do that because that’s not where we’re headed in the long run, and it is not the government’s responsibility to give these guys a business model. We should let the market decide,” Frank explained.
“The reason why open source is important is because you need to be able to customize and configure. It’s just a pure economic calculus. Why are we going to pay a 3x markup for a model?” Frank said, referring to the higher cost of closed, frontier AI models.
JD’s manually curated links for God-fearing MAGA patriots
Other experts believe American open AI may help businesses with lower cost solutions.
“A strong American open-source ecosystem finally gives businesses a real alternative. Open models cost a fraction of commercial models, but do not need to outperform every frontier model on every task,” Lauren Gil, the governing board member of the Tokenomics Foundation as well as the cofounder and president of Kimchi Coding, told the DCNF.
“You would not rent a Ferrari to bring home groceries. Likewise, a routine coding task does not automatically require the most expensive model,” Gil remarked.
“We recently launched Kimchi Coding to tackle this specific problem head-on. It automatically matches coding tasks to the right models, so developers can spend more time building without worrying about each request’s cost,” Gil added.
Gil added that open-source models allow corporations to better secure their most sensitive data than closed models.
“It is all about trust and security. Commercial models have a trust issue,” he explained. “We all know closed commercial-model companies use any training data they can get for their next release. As a result, some enterprises are reluctant to share their most sensitive intellectual property, data, and source code with service providers that may use that data for training, willingly or unwillingly. An American open-weight model gives enterprises the comfort of running it on-prem, air-gapped, on their own dedicated GPUs, or within a secure cloud environment they control.”
Open-source AI was once dominated by Chinese labs and their models experienced so much demand that the Trump administration considered banning or limiting access to them over the summer, the DCNF reported.
In July Moonshot AI, a Beijing-based startup, launched Kimi K3, an open-source model that threatened America’s lead in the global race on AI, according to Axios.
The Chinese open-source race became predominantly represented by Chinese labs such as Moonshot, DeepSeek, and Z.ai, according to Kyle Chan, a fellow at the Brookings Institution. The advent of Kimi K3 made the Trump administration appear more interested in banning Chinese open-source AI over the summer, according to Axios.
Now, Reflection, an Nvidia-backed startup developing its own open-source AI model, enters the national dialogue.
Reflection’s open-source model, Beam, could rival the most expensive closed, frontier AI models from Anthropic and OpenAI and keep pace with Chinese open-source models, Axios reported this week.
Reflection CEO Misha Laskin has argued that owning and controlling how the AI operates may be more important than raw AI power.
“Once you’re spending that amount on intelligence, you want to move from renting it to owning it yourself. That’s kind of where open source is very powerful because it is customizable at every level,” Laskin told Axios in October.
“Our goal is to give end users control, sovereignty and continuity, at lower cost – and contribute to a growing open ecosystem, with multiple frontier labs pushing one another forward. The launch of Beam is just the start,” Eleanor Hawkins, a public policy communications official for Reflection, wrote in October on X.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has long sought to combine high-end computing power with open-source AI models so that businesses could retain their own data, according to The Information.
An Nvidia spokesperson referred the DCNF to Huang’s comments in late September.
“I believe very deeply in advancing open intelligence,” he told CNBC at the time. “I think we ought to democratize intelligence. I think every company will become an AI company. And this platform really, really keeps that community thriving.”
There are other rising open-source AI models.
Nvidia in August announced a $1 billion investment in the AI startup Poolside to build its own open-source models that would compete against Anthropic and OpenAI, according to the Wall Street Journal. Poolside employees will help Nvidia develop the Nemotron project, which aims to develop its own open-weight models that the company released in 2023.
Thinking Machines Lab in July released its open-source model, Inkling, according to Forbes. The AI startup said, although its model is not the strongest, it is very customizable, according to a Thinking Machines Lab press release.
Thinking Machines Lab declined to respond to a DCNF comment request.
Together AI runs a cloud-based platform for running, fine-tuning and scaling open-weight AI models, per a blog post on its website. The AI startup did not respond to a comment request from the DCNF.
The Trump administration appears to be on board with open AI as well.
A Reflection spokesperson referred the DCNF to Laskin’s panel with White House National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross at the Black Hat conference in August.
“I think the role that open source plays is vital to this ecosystem,” Cairncross said at the Black Hat during the panel about how open-source AI plays a part in cybersecurity.
“We are extremely interested in looking at ways to build U.S. open source, making it competitive, making it the preferential adoption by planet Earth for U.S. open source,” he continued.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
