On Friday, David Sacks, former White House AI and crypto czar and current co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, defended open-source artificial intelligence models.
He cited legal-tech startup Harvey’s new Tenet model as evidence of American innovation built on open systems.
Sacks Warns Against Restrictions
In a post on X, Sacks said Harvey’s approach shows how “American companies are building world-class specialized models.”
He noted that the startup used the open-source Kimi K3 as a base and trained it on legal data, achieving top-tier results on legal benchmarks at a fraction of the cost of proprietary “frontier” models.
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Sacks further argued that restrictions on open models would do nothing to stop Chinese labs from shipping comparable technology. “Restrictions that kneecap open models would do nothing to stop Chinese labs from shipping the next Kimi.”
Instead, he said such limits would cripple startups like Harvey that depend on open systems to build affordable, high-performance tools.
He added that some closed AI labs would welcome such restrictions, since they would eliminate competition.
Notably, Sacks, along with investor Bill Ackman, had earlier called Kimi K3’s benchmark rise “concerning” in July, when the model from Chinese startup Moonshot briefly outranked Anthropic‘s Claude Fable 5.
Kimi K3 is a massive 2.8 trillion-parameter open-weight model that Moonshot launched in July.
Harvey’s New Model Targets Legal Work Efficiency
Harvey unveiled Tenet this week, built on Kimi K3 and post-trained with Fireworks AI.
According to Harvey, the model posted an 82% improvement in all-pass rate on the LAB legal benchmark and achieved state-of-the-art results on LAB Contracts.
Harvey added that Tenet runs at under one-fourth the cost of leading foundation models, and that the company plans to expand the system to more legal jurisdictions and practice areas.
A lot of debate has been taking place around open-source AI models in recent times.
Last week, Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ:META) CEO Mark Zuckerberg continued advocating for open AI models, arguing that wider access can accelerate innovation and prevent a small number of companies from controlling the AI ecosystem.
Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors.
Image via Shutterstock
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