Open-Source AI Has Already Outrun the Regulators Writing Its Rules

The EU AI Act's open-source exemptions were a political compromise, but they function as a structural withdrawal. By exempting open-source releases from core compliance obligations, the Act effectively handed the governance problem to whoever deploys the model downstream — deployers who may be small, distributed, and operating across jurisdictions where the Act's reach is contested. The enforcement template the Act was supposed to establish applies cleanly only to the closed-source labs it was partly written to constrain.