Why frontier labs still shouldn’t panic over open weights
teortaxesTex · x · 2026-07-21
A reply to a thread argues that frontier labs should stop fearing open source: their margins are still too fat for open models to threaten immediately.
The attached article screenshot makes the case more concretely:
- It says open weights are not decelerating capex in the leading labs in the way some critics claim.
- One highlighted example claims Opus 4.6 once accounted for 3/4 of Anthropic API revenue and 80% with Fast Mode.
- In the same SemiAnalysis-style comparison, the prior Opus generation is said to have fallen from 10% of revenue to 0.2% in five quarters as price collapsed from $35 to $3 per million tokens.
- The argument is that open models did not cause that collapse; the next closed-model release did.
- The post frames open source as a rent-eroding force, but not yet a fatal one for frontier lab economics.
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