India, Sept. 14 -- China's latest Artificial Intelligence (AI) proposal to BRICS raises a deceptively simple question: what does it mean for an AI system to be open?

Downloading model weights is one answer. It is not the whole answer.

At the BRICS summit in New Delhi, Chinese President Xi Jinping proposed an "open source and inclusive AI initiative," including a BRICS AI open-source community, cooperation on Large Language Models (LLMs), specialist training, and a broader open AI ecosystem. Alongside it came proposals for a BRICS digital ecosystem cloud platform, smart-factory cooperation, technical standards, and engineering development.

Taken together, these are not merely pieces of an open-model program. They begin to resemble layer...