Mozilla’s CTO thinks AI should be built like the internet
Raffi Krikorian explains that while consumers flock to ChatGPT and Claude, companies are increasingly turning to open models that they can customize and control.
Mozilla's Chief Technology Officer, Raffi Krikorian, argues that artificial intelligence should be developed like the internet. In a recent report, the free software community and nonprofit project found that the performance gap between leading open-source models and proprietary systems like Claude and ChatGPT has narrowed to just 3%.
Krikorian believes that organizations require alternatives to proprietary AI systems to maintain greater control over their data and infrastructure. As businesses increasingly experiment with open and open-weight models, Krikorian suggests that policymakers view AI as infrastructure rather than a product. He notes that the open-source, open-weight AI ecosystem is growing rapidly, with Alibaba's open-source model Qwen being downloaded more times than the next eight models combined in February 2026.
Open-source AI models may appear complex and risky to the uninitiated, but they offer significant benefits in terms of price-performance and data control for regulated industries. Krikorian hopes that the government will recognize the potential of open-source AI and support its development.
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