A new front has opened in the U.S.-China competition in artificial intelligence: open-weight, local AI models. Until recently, the most capable AI models were too big and too costly to run anywhere but in giant data centers packed with expensive, specialized chips. But now these systems are rapidly migrating from the cloud to consumer hardware—including laptops and mobile devices—where they can answer questions, write code, and take actions on a user’s behalf without sending data to a remote server. Thanks to technological advances in both AI models and chips, the so-called open-weight AI models that increasingly underpin most local AI deployments are smarter and smaller than their predecessors and can be freely downloaded from the Internet, modified, and deployed without a centralized provider.

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