Completely agree with this, I'm sick of people conflating the two. Open-weight models should be treated no more favourably than proprietary freeware.

Sure you can run tests and benchmarks on open-weight models, but that is the extent - there is no scrutiny, no auditing for bias or copyright contamination - just a black box that you rely on for "intelligence". I'm still shocked the way people can hand over not just huge swathes of data, but also decisions of all shapes and sizes - to AI companies with no way of being able to assess how the sausage is made.