India, June 30 -- Open source software has long been a pillar of U.S. technology leadership.

In 1969, DARPA connected four university computers - from UCLA, Stanford, UCSB, and the University of Utah - laying the infrastructure backbone that became the Internet.

In those early days, U.S.-led open source contributions also drove leadership in coding languages, with UNIX in 1969 and C at Bell Labs in 1972. These languages led to more open source software building on those foundations, including the Linux Kernel in 1991, GitHub in 2008 and Docker in 2013.

Today, open models are making frontier-level AI broadly accessible, with control over customization and trust through transparency. They give enterprises and government agencies the abil...