How we’ll fight the platform war against Big AI
The article argues Big AI companies are vulnerable and the open ecosystem can beat them using platform strategy: open interfaces, seamless provider switching, free open-source models, and channeling public anger into ethical tools. Coordinated action by developers and users can shift power away from corporate AI platforms.
Background
Anil Dash is a veteran tech writer and entrepreneur (Glitch, Makerbase, ThinkUp) who has been covering internet culture and platform power dynamics since the early 2000s. This essay is a call for users and developers to treat Big AI (OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Meta, Anthropic) the same way the open-source community once fought Microsoft's dominance — by coordinating around open tools, switching between providers easily, and undermining corporate lock-in. Dash argues that AI is still young enough that it's winnable, and that the deep public anger at AI companies gives the open ecosystem unusual leverage. Key concepts mentioned: "commoditize the complement" (a classic platform strategy of making others' products free to make your own more valuable, borrowed from Joel Spolsky's famous essays); "frontier minus six" (open models roughly six months behind the cutting edge, which is good enough for most uses); and "Internet of consent" (Dash's vision for technology that respects user rights rather than extracting from them).