May 2, 2025

If You Don’t Own the Code, the Code Owns You

Why Government AI Can’t Be a Black Box

You’re a leader inside a government agency, a defense contractor, or a federal IT team trying to modernize the way decisions get made. Everyone’s talking about AI.

But here’s what no one’s telling you:

If your agency doesn’t control its AI—then AI controls your agency

We’ve seen this story play out.

Proprietary AI tools get pitched as plug-and-play solutions. Contracts get signed. Budgets get eaten. And when things go wrong? No one can open the hood.

Now, you’ve got mission-critical decisions being made by systems you can’t audit, can’t modify, and can’t afford to rip out.

That’s not innovation.

That’s lock-in.

So what’s the move?

The narrative forgets this fact. That needs to stop. Policymakers fret over AI monopolies. Startups hesitate, believing they can’t compete. The public assumes AI is locked behind corporate firewalls.

But the reality? AI is already decentralized. The only ones pretending otherwise are the ones profiting from that illusion.

Joe Merrill—CEO of OpenTeams and one of the most trusted voices in open source infrastructure—just laid it out in plain terms:

“The future of AI should be open. Let’s make it happen.”

Read the full post→

In his latest essay, Joe breaks down:

Why the White House’s new AI executive order is a wake-up call
How failed government AI projects could’ve been avoided
Why open source is the only path to secure, sovereign, and scalable AI in public infrastructure
What leaders should demand right now to prevent AI from becoming a liability

You don’t have to be a machine learning expert to understand what’s at stake. You just have to ask one question: