Open Weights Is All You Need

Last week, more than 230 organizations signed the Open Weights and American AI Leadership letter, asking Washington to protect the open weight ecosystem instead of restricting it. Anaconda, our new parent company, is among them. NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang announced the coalition behind it in his first ever post on X. It was a good week for open.

Now, we’re bringing the data to back up the need for an open ecosystem.

Kilo doesn’t make models. We don’t host them, we don’t train on or retain your data. We’re the application and routing layer, the part that sends each coding task to whichever inference you choose, through approved providers and policies for your organization. Our data is worth something in this debate, because we have no side in the open-versus-closed battle. We just watch which models builders actually use.

Here’s what we see.

Share of all token usage: open-weight vs proprietary. Week of Jul 20, 2026

As of the week of July 20, 2026, open-weight models accounted for 79.1% of all token usage on Kilo. Proprietary models were the remaining 20.9%. And that number is not finished climbing. Not long ago open weights were a small minority of the traffic. Today they're a capable workhorse in the inference stack.

Share of all token usage: open-weight vs proprietary. Week of Jul 21, 2025

When Jensen Huang shared the letter, he made a point we agree with completely: the world needs both frontier closed models and frontier open ones. Our data supports that. Closed frontier models are excellent at the hardest problems, and builders use them there. But for the other ~80% of the work, open weights often win on a combination of these things: accuracy on the specific task, cost, privacy, and the freedom to run them where you want.

The model boom

A year ago, "which model to use" was a short conversation. Now a new one lands almost every week from the likes of Nemotron, Qwen, GLM, MiniMax, Kimi, Mistral, and the frontier labs. And the list goes on. The menu has exploded, and no…

Open-weight usage by lab