Why Does Palo Alto Networks Prefer Open Weight AI?

Nikesh Arora says Palo Alto Networks prefers open source, open weight models because the company can modify the weights, train them, and interrogate the chain of thought.

Palo Alto Networks wants to embrace AI as quickly as many startups. After comparing open source models with cloud models, the company chose open weight models. Over time, enterprises will need explainability and auditability, 100%. In financial services and healthcare, a team cannot tell a boss that nobody knows what happened and the IT group simply put an AI model in place, because a regulator will not accept an answer with no explanation. Financial services and healthcare want explainability, verifiability, and auditability. Nikesh Arora says Palo Alto Networks can only get explainability, verifiability, and auditability with open source, open weight models, which is why the company is gravitating toward them instead of the closed race.

The challenge is finding a global, resilient, highly available inference provider outside the hyperscaler community. A startup can rent 10 megawatts in one data center in one part of the US.