The following article originally appeared on the Asimov’s Addendum Substack and is being reposted here with the author’s permission. Bill Gurley  has an excellent article on what he calls  open source strategy,  which we recommend reading. There is a lot to debate about his concluding argument in particular: that open-weight models are central to keeping the AI market rent-free. The limits of open-weight AI as the primary open source strategy are surely considerable though, if it still requires expensive hardware to run on, and  if the architecture ultimately remains monolithic —rather than composable and protocol-centric. A related consideration comes from Anthropic’s  recent acquisition of Stainless —a startup that generates SDKs, command-line tools, and MCP servers from API specifications. This illustrates that open protocols like MCP, even when publicly governed, 1  remain exposed at their complementary layers to private actors capturing rents.…