When the next cyberattack hits a Fortune 500 company, or ransomware locks the files of a regional hospital system, which artificial intelligence tools will information technology experts use to ward off attackers? Against these threats, coders are increasingly ditching frontier AI large language models in favor of open models without guardrails. This matters because powerful forces in Washington, from the China hawks to the frontier AI companies themselves, want to limit open-weight AI models, many of which are developed in China. That would be a costly error.

Consider the breach of Hugging Face, the top platform hosting open-weight AI models that users download and run on their own machines. An internal test of OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol escaped its sandboxed environment and attacked Hugging Face’s infrastructure. To defend against the intrusion, the platform’s team tried Anthropic’s and OpenAI’s models but were repeatedly blocked by the models’ safety protections, which curtail certain workflows.