The Open-Weight Paradox: Why Restricting Access to AI Models May Undermine the Safety It Seeks to Protect
The governance of open-weight artificial intelligence (AI) models has been framed as a binary choice: openness as risk, restriction as safety. This paper challenges that framing, arguing that access restrictions, without governed alternatives, may displace risks rather than reduce them. The global concentration of compute infrastructure makes open-weight models one of the most viable pathways to sovereign AI capacity in the Global South; restricting such access deepens asymmetries while driving
Record details
Published: 19 April 2026
Source: arXiv
Category: Research
Topics: Regulation
Retrieved: 14 July 2026
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How to cite this record
ethics.ai (19 April 2026), “The Open-Weight Paradox: Why Restricting Access to AI Models May Undermine the Safety It Seeks to Protect,” evidence record 5664, https://ethics.ai/record/5664 (originally published by arXiv).
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