The a16z Show · Sunday, July 26, 2026
Ben Horowitz argued that open-source AI models are inherently safer than proprietary ones because the entire community can contribute to identifying and fixing safety issues. He contrasted this with the limitations of a single company, especially a monopoly, in addressing the vast array of potential problems.
“And, you know, and I think the important point there is, you can't actually ban open source, of course. You know, it's out there. It's, it's out there on the internet, like, you know, we have no way of doing that. But you can prevent the good guys from using it.”
“And so, if you look at the history of the industry, the open source version of everything has been much safer. So, the internet and Linux were far safer than Windows, like, by a lot. And why is that? Well, because the whole community could work on the safety problems, uh, as opposed to just a company, and particularly a monopoly company that, you know, like, you can't. Even if Windows has a million security bugs, there's nothing we could do about it because it was a monopoly at the time, right?”