The End of the Foundation Model Era: Open-Weight Models, Sovereign AI, and Inference as Infrastructure
arXiv:2604.06217v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: 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 […]