The Open-Weight Paradox: Why Restricting Access to AI Models May Undermine the Safety It Seeks to Protect

ArXi:2604.17413v1 Announce Type: cross The governance of open-weight artificial intelligence (AI) models has been framed as a binary choice: openness as risk, restriction as safety. This paper challenges that framing, arguing that access restrictions, without governed alternatives, may displace risks rather than reduce them. The global concentration of compute infrastructure makes open-weight models one of the most viable pathways to sovereign AI capacity in the Global South; restricting such access deepens asymmetries while driving proliferation into unsupervised settings.