The Globe and Mail reports in its Saturday edition that AT&T Inc. turned to artificial-intelligence models from Anthropic and OpenAI in recent years to help with customer service, call transcription and coding. A New York Times dispatch to The Globe says AI models charged fees and were "closed," which meant the AI companies did not share their underlying code. This year, AT&T changed course. As AI costs skyrocketed, Andy Markus, the company's chief data and AI officer, looked for cheaper alternatives. He landed on "open" models, which can be downloaded and modified without payment or approval. By May, open models accounted for 20 per cent of AT&T's AI use. That has since risen to 40 per cent and may jump to 60 per cent in the coming months. AT&T was saving up to 80 per cent on AI costs compared with earlier this year. Open-source AI is all the rage in corporate America. Like AT&T, companies such as Airbnb and Deloitte are also turning to open AI models that are easy to customize and cheaper to use. Open models now account for 58 per cent of AI use, up from 10 per cent a year ago, according to U.S. user data from OpenRouter, a platform that lets people choose different AI models to complete tasks.