American businesses are reportedly turning to lower-cost “open” artificial intelligence models to gain control over rising tech expenses.
As the Financial Times (FT) reported Sunday (Sept. 27), open-weight models, which users can run on their own hardware, can be less costly for companies than paying for access to advanced models from companies like OpenAI and Anthropic.
Management references to “open weight” or “open source” models in earnings calls and investor conferences jumped sixfold in August and September compared with the same two-month stretch in 2025, FT said, citing data from research platform AlphaSense.
Although the shift is most obvious among technology firms, businesses across a range of sectors including PNC Financial Services, logistics company CH Robinson and industrial giant Siemens, have discussed using open-weight models in recent weeks, FT added.
Vinay Kuruvila, chief technology officer at Tinder, said the company had started routing some queries from non-technical users to open-weight models as the dating app worked to get a handle in increasing AI costs.
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“In January we were spending at the rate of $1 million per year and by July it had climbed to $10 million … I don’t want another 10X increase,” he said. “The frontier models like OpenAI’s Astra and Claude Fable already have enough intelligence for 90% of the tasks we’re trying to do. If open-weights models catch up, I may not need to use them anymore.”
PYMNTS wrote earlier this year that the AI industry had been dividing itself along one of the most fundamental debates of the software sector: open versus closed source.
This came as Nvidia joined several other tech giants in launching a new AI safety coalition, calling on companies and governments to “invest in shared open infrastructure for AI defense — datasets, evaluation frameworks, attack simulators and red-teaming tools — much as past generations invested in open source software,” per Nvidia’s statement.
But as PYMNTS wrote, the contest is less ideological than financial as far as middle market company’s CFOs are concerned.
“The relevant question is not whether open-weight AI will defeat proprietary AI. It is whether the savings, flexibility and control offered by open models are sufficient to justify assuming more responsibility for the infrastructure beneath them,” the report said.
“That tradeoff will become more important as AI moves beyond isolated chatbots and begins operating across finance, procurement, treasury, compliance and enterprise software.”
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