In a land far, far away—downtown San Francisco—a storm is brewing.

Two rival factions solemnly prepare for battle.

They’ve sharpened their code, consolidated their enterprise offerings, summoned lobbyists, and trained their social media warriors.

To the hum of rapid typing and Wispr Flows, they descend down Market Street, clad in Patagonia fatigues and strapped with AI wearables. Knowing their Whoop is counting every step.

And soon they find themselves on familiar battlegrounds: Washington, Wall Street and—perhaps riskiest of all—podcasts hosted by omniscient bros.

One side champions open weights. The other, closed models.

But like any good villain origin story, these factions weren’t always opposed. Not long ago, they all sat on the same side of the (cap) table.

Then Kimi K3 came in and blew everything up.

Here’s the Tea.

Kimi K3, China’s newest open-weight model, has sent shockwaves through Silicon Valley by performing within striking distance of frontier models at a fraction of the cost. Because the model is open-source and open-weight, companies can customize it, self-host it and run it on their own terms.

Suddenly, Silicon Valley is asking a much bigger question: Why are we still renting intelligence?

This week, Microsoft, Meta, NVIDIA and dozens of tech giants an open letter supporting open-weight AI.

Noticeably absent from the list? Anthropic. (OpenAI and Google held out till the very end too).

And in a way, it’s obvious why. Frontier labs want their most powerful models closed, controlled and marching straight to the bottom line.

For businesses, however, open-weight models offer something even more valuable: control.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella calls this the “Reverse Information Paradox”: enterprises are essentially paying for AI twice right now—once with money, and again with the proprietary knowledge they feed into someone else’s model.

My Tea: I see an enterprise world where companies increasingly own and customize their model layer. Why wouldn’t they want the additional privacy, security and independence?

And in that universe, frontier labs will either have to bend the knee—or risk getting outgunned.

Something to brew on ☕️