Manufacturing consensus: two pivotal moments for OSI and its open source AI definition

In 2023, the Open Source Initiative (OSI) started to develop efforts towards defining open source AI. As an academic working on “AI” with an interest in claims of openness, I followed these developments with interest. In our own work on openness and transparency, me and Andreas Liesenfeld had documented the growth in nominally “open” large language models (‘Opening up ChatGPT‘, CUI 2023), built the first systematic evidence-based AI openness index, and documented clear evidence of open-washing on the part of “AI” providers (‘Rethinking Open Source Generative AI: Open-Washing and the EU AI Act‘, FaccT’24). In the latter paper we already sounded a cautious note: if everything hinges on licensing, what is to stop model providers from releasing the most inscrutable portion of their system (say, model weights) under an OSI-approved licence and collect open source benefits? This stands to be a major avenue for open-washing We also noted that a definition specifically would become a focal…

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