The End of the Foundation Model Era: Open-Weight Models, Sovereign AI, and Inference as Infrastructure
The foundation model era -- roughly 2020 to 2025 -- is over. The forces that defined it have inverted. Open source models have reached frontier performance while inference costs approach zero, exposing what was always structurally true: pre-training large language models at scale is not a durable competitive moat. The US government's formal designation of Anthropic as a supply chain risk in February 2026 accelerated a transition already underway -- but did not cause it. The paper argues that the AI industry is restructuring simultaneously along four axes: economic, as the circular financing structure that inflated foundation model valuations collapses; technical, as the pre-training scali...
| Authors | Jared James Grogan |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CY |
| Published | 18 March 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 18 March 2026 |
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