Open models trail the frontier by just 4.4 months — and the gap keeps resetting
V1.1 state of open source- OS 4.4 months behind frontier [pdf]
Mozilla's State of Open Source AI 2026 finds open models within 3 index points of closed leaders like Claude Opus 5, at 30% of the input price, and powering roughly a third of all tokens. Epoch and METR agree the capability lag is about four months, but the margin resets each release cycle rather than compounding. The real bottlenecks are data disclosure, deployment tooling, and a new form of lock-in.
None of them asked permission, and none of them could have rented this. They own it. That is the whole idea.