The common view says open-weight AI is bad news for frontier labs like OpenAI and Anthropic. ARK Invest’s Cathie Wood argues the opposite. An open-weight AI model is one in which the creator releases the underlying parameters publicly. It allows anyone to download, run, and modify it on their own hardware without paying for access.
Wood says the real threat of open-weight models is not that they replace frontier AI.It is that bad actors use them to attack enterprises. That security pressure, she argues, forces companies to keep buying frontier-grade AI for protection. This makes Open AI and Anthropic richer, not poorer.
Some Models Are Arming the Threat
Wood’s case inverts the popular investment narrative. As open-weight models from Meta, Mistral, and DeepSeek grow more capable, the conventional view is that enterprises will shift away from expensive frontier subscriptions.
Wood’s response: The more powerful open models become, the more dangerous the attack surface, and the stronger the enterprise case for frontier AI as the defense layer.
The UK’s AI Security Institute found that open-weight models now match frontier cyber capabilities from just four to seven months ago. ARK’s own AI primetime report flagged expanding AI infrastructure spend as a defining trend of the decade.
Wood’s Pick for the Revenue Winners
Wood named OpenAI, Anthropic, and SpaceXAI, as the companies most likely to take the majority of model-driven revenue. ARK holds positions across all three.
“Ironically, contrary to the narrative, open weight models are becoming an important reason that OpenAI, Anthropic, and ultimately, in our view, SpaceXAI are likely to take the vast majority of model-driven AI revenue,” Wood said.
Anthropic filed its S-1 at a near $1 trillion valuation, with OpenAI eyeing a September 2026 debut. Wood’s thesis reframes both companies not as casualties of open-source disruption, but as its biggest winners.
That logic only strengthens over time. The cheaper AI gets for attackers, the more enterprises need the best defense available.
Source: BeInCrypto
