​Open Source AI Week 2026 | Open Weight Debate Night

​The Open Weight Debate is where Open Source AI Week gets into discussion, opinions, and fun. We're bringing together sharp minds who actually like to debate and discuss with each other and putting them on stage to hash it out live.

​Real arguments, real examples, and real dialogue about the questions that matter most to the future of open source AI from leaders shaping the AI ecosystem including Ion Stoica (UC Berkeley, Databricks, Anyscale), Percy Liang (Stanford, MARIN Project, Open Athena), Ben Brooks (Black Forest Labs), Cheryl Cheng (M12), Malo Bourgon (MIRI), David Bellamy, MBZUAI Institute of Foundation Models) and moderated by Michael Schwarz (Microsoft), Vibhu Sapra (AI Engineer / Latent Space), and Sophia Dew (MTS Live).

​We're hosting at GitHub HQ where the developer minds are at.

​Agenda

• ​5:30 PM – Registration & Networking

• ​6:00 PM – Welcome & Event Overview

• ​6:15 PM – Debate #1: The risk of frontier-level capabilities in open models will outweigh the benefits.

• ​7:00 PM – Debate #2: The democratization of AI requires affordable access to intelligence, not public access to model weights.

• ​7:45 PM – Debate #3: Closed models will retain an overall performance capability advantage over open-weight models

• ​8:25 PM – Closing Remarks & Next Event Announcements

• ​8:30 PM – Event Concludes

​Expect some spicy takes, a few surprises, learn a few things, disagree or agree. Whether you're firmly on one side of the debate or genuinely undecided, this is the session where things get interesting fast.

​This is one of the highlight events of Open Source AI Week. Check out opensourceaiweek.com for the full lineup and more info on what else is happening throughout the week.

​About the hosts

• ​Microsoft delivers the cloud, AI, and data platforms that help researchers and enterprises build, train, and deploy intelligent systems at scale. Through Windows, Microsoft Foundry, and Azure computing infrastructure, Microsoft is accelerating scientific discovery and innovation from on device to cloud.

• ​GitHub is the world's leading developer platform, helping millions of developers build software with AI. Through GitHub Copilot, open source collaboration, and developer workflows, GitHub is bringing agentic AI capabilities to researchers, startups, and enterprises alike.

• ​Open Intelligence Foundation is a community-first nonprofit founded to protect, strengthen, and advance open-source AI, open models, and open science. The foundation also leads Open Source AI Week, a community-run initiative celebrating open-source AI.