US Corporate Mentions of Open-Source AI Models Surge Sixfold

According to a Financial Times investigation using AlphaSense data, mentions of open-weight or open-source models in US corporate earnings calls and investor meetings increased approximately sixfold year-over-year in August and September. Companies such as PNC Financial, C.H. Robinson, and Siemens have recently discussed their applications. Tinder has scaled its annualized AI spending from $1 million in January to $10 million in July, shifting some requests to open-weight models. AT&T currently routes about 40% of its AI tasks to open models and plans to increase this to 70%, processing 45 billion tokens daily while reserving frontier models from OpenAI and Anthropic for complex tasks.