AI is being built behind closed doors, and that’s a dangerous mistake | Opinion

Artificial intelligence is quietly reshaping every corner of modern life. From how we search the web to how we invest, learn, and vote, AI models now mediate some of our most critical decisions. But behind the growing convenience lies a deeper, more urgent concern: the public has no visibility into how these models work, what they’re trained on, or who benefits from them.

This is déjà vu.

We’ve lived through this before with social media, entrusting a small group of companies with unprecedented power over public discourse. This resulted in algorithmic opacity, monetized outrage, and the erosion of shared reality. This time, it’s not just our feeds at risk, but our decision-making systems, legal frameworks, and core institutions.

And we’re walking into it with our eyes wide shut.

A centralized future is already taking shape

Today’s AI landscape is dominated by a handful of powerful labs operating behind closed doors. These companies train large models on massive datasets—scraped from the internet, sometimes without consent—and release them in products that shape billions of digital interactions each day. These models aren’t open to scrutiny. The data isn’t auditable. The outcomes aren’t accountable.

This centralization isn’t just a technical issue. It’s a political and economic one. The future of cognition is being built in black boxes, gated behind legal firewalls, and optimized for shareholder value. As AI systems become more autonomous and embedded in society, we risk turning essential public infrastructure into privately governed engines.

The question isn’t whether AI will transform society; it already has. The real issue is whether we have any say in how that transformation unfolds.

The case for decentralized AI

There is, however, an alternative path—one that is already being explored by communities, researchers, and developers around the world.

Rather than reinforcing closed ecosystems, this movement suggests building AI systems that are transparent by design, decentralized in governance, and accountable to the people who power them. This shift requires more than technical innovation—it demands a cultural realignment around ownership, recognition, and collective responsibility.

In such a model, data isn’t merely extracted and monetized without acknowledgment. It is contributed, verified, and governed by the people who generate it. Contributors can earn recognition or rewards. Validators become stakeholders. And systems evolve with public oversight rather than unilateral control.

While these approaches are still early in development, they point toward a radically different future—one in which intelligence flows peer-to-peer, not top-down.

Why can’t transparency wait

The consolidation of AI infrastructure is happening at breakneck speed. Trillion-dollar firms are racing to build vertically integrated pipelines. Governments are proposing regulations but struggling to keep up. Meanwhile, trust in AI is faltering. A recent Edelman report found that only 35% of Americans trust AI companies, a significant drop from previous years.

This trust crisis isn’t surprising. How can the public trust systems that they don’t understand, can’t audit, and have no recourse against?

The only sustainable antidote is transparency, not just in the models themselves, but across every layer: from how data is gathered, to how models are trained, to who profits from their use. By supporting open infrastructure and building collaborative frameworks for attribution, we can begin to rebalance the power dynamic.

This isn’t about stalling innovation. It’s about shaping it.

What shared ownership could look like

Building a transparent AI economy requires rethinking more than codebases. It means revisiting the incentives that have defined the tech industry for the past two decades.

A more democratic AI future might include public ledgers that trace how data contributions influence outcomes, collective governance over model updates and deployment decisions, economic participation for contributors, trainers, and validators, and federated training systems that reflect local values and contexts.

They are starting points for a future where AI doesn’t just answer to capital but to a community.

The clock is ticking

We still have a choice in how this unfolds. We’ve already seen what happens when we surrender our digital agency to centralized platforms. With AI, the consequences will be even more far-reaching and less reversible. 

If we want a future where intelligence is a shared public good, not a private asset, then we must begin building systems that are open, auditable, and fair.

It starts with asking a simple question: Who should AI ultimately serve?

Ram Kumar

Ram Kumar is a core contributor at OpenLedger, a new economic layer for AI where data contributors, model builders, and application developers are finally recognized and rewarded for the value they create. With extensive experience handling multi-billion-dollar enterprise accounts, Ram has successfully worked with global giants such as Walmart, Sony, GSK, and the LA Times.