Foster, C. G. 2025. “Open” AI and technological trajectories: A value chain governance perspective, Paper presented at SASE 2025, Montreal, Canada, July
Abstract
The rise of AI has been rapid, becoming a leading sector for investment and promising disruptive impacts across the economy, including for business models, industry structure and broader society. Within the critical analysis of the economic impacts, AI has predominantly been aligned to the literature on data and platform capitalism –further concentrating power and value capture amongst a very small number of “big tech” leaders.
The equally rapid rise of “open” AI (taken here loosely to encompass a set of claims made about AI openness) signals an interesting development, with an emerging ecosystem of “open” AI models, datasets and toolchains. Advocates suggest these open resources, rapidly moving towards the cutting edge, signal the ability for “catch up” amongst entrepreneurial firms and at a national scale, even in the face of AI industry power.
This work seeks to add conceptual clarity to such debates by conceptualising “open” AI as a (unique) type of interfirm relation and therefore amenable to value chain analysis. This approach is fruitful because it allows consideration of “open” AI links to “AI lead firms”, and consequently the types of governance and power emerging within AI value chains. This work, therefore, develops previous “mapping” analysis of the AI value chain, to think critically about notions of interfirm relations and power.
Extending these conceptual investigations, I discuss case studies of “open” AI to illustrate different types of relations, and what they might mean in terms of technological learning, fragmentation, and power.