Also, if the concern here is safety, open models completely derail that.

Even if your someone who thinks open models are good for safety overall, a private model exposed only by an API point at least gives somebody control. How we should use that control is debatable, but at least it's there. Once you release that control by making a model open, you can't take it back.

If we think AI safety doesn't require closed weights, we should collectively decide on that and then move forward from there. But it shouldn't be something decided by default, by a few people from a few companies. We all have to live with the consequences of a choice like that, and since it is irreversible, we shouldn't decide it without consensus first.