Open-Source AI Hub, Now Owned by Chip Monopolist, Clarifies That 'Open' Refers to the Website

SAN FRANCISCO—Vaulted, the AI model-sharing platform whose founders spent seven years arguing that open-source development was the only ethical path forward for artificial intelligence, announced Tuesday that following its $11.9 billion acquisition by GPU maker Prism Semiconductor, the platform remains "fully open" under an updated definition circulated to the community that morning.

Open, per the five-page FAQ: open to browse, open to submit, open to the terms of the Prism AI Compute Agreement, and open to download for models under six billion parameters. Models above six billion parameters require a Prism Cloud API key, billed at $4.00 per billion parameters monthly — fifty-billion minimum.

"Open source has always required infrastructure," said a Vaulted spokesperson. "We've simply made the infrastructure more visible."

The 340 community maintainers who joined Vaulted at below-market salaries on the strength of its open-source mission will transition to roles as Open Community Relationship Leads within Prism's enterprise talent-retention structure. Their equity is vesting.

Vaulted's founding charter — which described the company's purpose as "ensuring that AI development is not controlled by any single commercial actor" — was removed from the platform Monday. A repository named "vaulted-charter-archive" was forked 14,000 times before noon.

The most-downloaded model on the updated platform is a 7B fine-tune trained by a Prism developer to explain, in 47 languages, why this outcome is consistent with open-source values.

Its system prompt is not public.