{"slug": "mot-a-tool-to-fight-openwashing-in-ai", "title": "[$] MOT: a tool to fight openwashing in AI", "summary": "The Model Openness Tool (MOT), presented by Arnaud Le Hors at Open Source Summit North America 2026, aims to help users assess the true openness of large language models (LLMs) that are often misleadingly labeled as open source. The tool evaluates models against the Open Source Initiative's Open Source Definition to combat \"openwashing,\" where models are described as open but only offer limited access such as open weights. MOT provides a standardized way to determine the degree to which an LLM meets open-source criteria.", "body_md": "Many large language models (LLMs) are described as open source, but\nif one looks a bit deeper it turns out that is not actually so; the\nmodel may be free to download, it may be \"[open weight](https://opensource.org/ai/open-weights)\", but it\ndoes not fit the [Open Source\nInitiative](http://opensource.org/) (OSI) [Open Source\nDefinition](https://opensource.org/osd) (OSD). Assessing the actual openness of models is not\neasy, as Arnaud Le Hors explained in his talk about the [Model Openness Tool](https://mot.isitopen.ai/) (MOT) at [Open\nSource Summit North America](https://events.linuxfoundation.org/open-source-summit-north-america/) 2026. The tool is designed to help\nusers of LLMs understand to what degree a model is (or is not) open,\nand to combat the [openwashing](https://openwashing.org/)\nthat is prevalent with LLMs.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/mot-a-tool-to-fight-openwashing-in-ai", "canonical_source": "https://lwn.net/Articles/1073420/", "published_at": "2026-05-27 15:52:01+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-05-27 15:52:56.327133+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["large-language-models", "ai-ethics", "ai-policy", "ai-tools"], "entities": ["Arnaud Le Hors", "Open Source Initiative", "Model Openness Tool", "Open Source Summit North America"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/mot-a-tool-to-fight-openwashing-in-ai", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/mot-a-tool-to-fight-openwashing-in-ai.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/mot-a-tool-to-fight-openwashing-in-ai.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/mot-a-tool-to-fight-openwashing-in-ai.jsonld"}}