Mozilla’s Inaugural ‘State of Open Source AI’ Report Is Here

Open source AI has crossed a threshold. For years the debate has centered around whether open models could ever compete with closed ones. This is no longer a debate we should be having. Today Mozilla is publishing its inaugural State of Open Source AI report, built on new analysis and a global survey of 950+ developers, showing that open models are no longer playing catch-up. The performance gap with top proprietary systems like ChatGPT and Claude has narrowed to just 3%, while costs have fallen up to 50x in three years.

But the report also surfaces a harder truth. Open models now power roughly a third of real-world AI usage, but capture only 4% of the revenue. So while the value is there, it just isn’t flowing back into the open ecosystem that made it possible. Meanwhile, the geopolitical picture is shifting fast.

Asia is racing ahead

China and East Asia now lead the world in open source AI adoption, at 89%, far ahead of the West, treating open source as a cornerstone of national strategy. Governments elsewhere are responding, with 12 new national AI strategies launched last year, and 47 countries now restrict foreign processing for critical workloads. The EU, Canada, and India are backing open ecosystems with real public investment, treating AI infrastructure as a strategic asset.

Developers want open models, but they can’t always ship them.

For developers, the appetite for open source is there, and cost and privacy rank as developers’ top reasons for choosing models. But wanting to use open models and running them in production are different things. 79% of developers use open models, yet only 51% have deployed them in production, versus 63% for closed models.