Sam Altman signals OpenAI will ship a new open-weight model, citing board-level strategy discussions

Simon Willison's Blog·high signal

In a quote surfaced by Simon Willison on July 20, Altman says OpenAI has been having 'extensive discussions around open source strategy' and wants to create a language model with an open release soon, pending the next board meeting. This lands the same week OpenAI's policy lead publicly attacked open-weight Chinese models as 'full AI communism' — an unusually direct internal contradiction. For builders, it suggests a US open-weight frontier option may be back on the table after a long gap.