“Borrowing intelligence to build a business”: The promise of open‐source AI for entrepreneurship

Research Summary Open‐source artificial intelligence (OSAI) is an increasingly important yet poorly understood frontier for entrepreneurial activity. We identify four defining features that shape new ventures' engagement with OSAI communities: dependence on sponsoring firms, layered licensing regimes, regulatory risks, and nation‐state influence. We develop the OSAI Framework for Market Entry to explain how open‐weight models relocate, rather than merely lower, entry barriers across six domains in AI‐enabled product and service markets. They may reduce resource barriers but create dependence on the governance of borrowed components, shifting the binding constraint from technical to commercial entry and value capture through complementary assets. We discuss contributions to research on entrepreneurial entry and strategy, private‐collective innovation, the openness paradox, and the new venture life cycle, and outline directions for future research. Managerial Summary Open‐source artificial intelligence (OSAI) offers new ventures access to powerful resources for developing AI‐enabled products and services without building AI capabilities from scratch. Yet new ventures must often contend with four key governance dependencies that shape how they engage with OSAI communities: reliance on large technology firms that contribute and steer critical layers of the AI stack, licensing terms that vary by layer, emerging regulatory requirements, and growing nation‐state influence over OSAI. Our OSAI Framework for Market Entry identifies where OSAI can lower entry barriers, where constraints shift instead, and how new ventures can manage the trade‐offs resulting from governance dependencies. It helps new ventures and investors evaluate when, where, and how to build on OSAI components, and which complementary assets can protect their returns.