The End of the Foundation Model Era: Open-Weight Models, Sovereign AI, and Inference as Infrastructure

A research paper argues that the foundation model era (2020-2025) has ended as open-source models reach frontier performance and inference costs decline, fundamentally undermining the competitive moat of large-scale pre-training. The shift is driven by simultaneous restructuring across economic, technical, commercial, and political dimensions, with open-weight models emerging as tools for government sovereignty over AI capabilities.