Every frontier model is a compression of humanity's collective output. The training corpus is our books, our code, our forum arguments at 2am, our Wikipedia edits, our Stack Overflow answers, the photographs we posted, the songs we wrote about. No lab created this knowledge. They distilled what we already made, together, over centuries.

We already have a legal framework for exactly this situation: the patent. Society's bargain with inventors is simple. You get a temporary, exclusive right to profit from your contribution, and in exchange the knowledge eventually becomes public domain so everyone can build on it. The monopoly is the incentive; the expiry is the price. We decided long ago that no one should own an idea forever, even one they genuinely originated.

A trained model is a stronger case for this bargain, not a weaker one. The inventor of a drug at least synthesized a novel molecule. A model is overwhelmingly a derivative work, its capabilities being our capabilities, re-encoded. Yet current practice grants the labs a perpetual, closed monopoly over that re-encoding, with none of the public-domain backstop we demand of every other field.

So here's the proposal: a model's weights must be published openly after a fixed term, say one year from release.

One year is an eternity in this field. It's more than enough to capture the competitive advantage of being first, to recoup the enormous training cost, to build the products and the brand on top of a frontier model. Labs would still race to lead, because leading for twelve months is hugely valuable. But the moat would be temporal, not permanent, and that's the whole point. A time-limited exclusivity rewards genuine innovation without letting a handful of companies fence off the commons indefinitely.

The downstream effects are exactly what we'd want. Yesterday's frontier becomes today's public infrastructure. Researchers get real artifacts to study for safety and bias instead of black boxes. Startups and the open-source community build on a steadily advancing public baseline. Smaller players and the public sector stop being permanently a generation behind. And the labs keep their incentive to push forward, because the only way to stay ahead is to keep inventing, not to sit on a model trained on everyone's work and rent it back to them forever.

Patents got the trade-off right: protect the inventor long enough to reward the work, then return the knowledge to the people it ultimately came from. Models, trained on all of us, deserve the same deal, on a clock that matches how fast this field actually moves.