The Globe and Mail reports in its Saturday edition that AT&T 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. Open-source AI is all the rage in corporate America. Last week, chipmaker Nvidia announced it was buying Hugging Face, a library of open AI models, for $12.9-billion (U.S.). "Together, we will make AI more open, more capable and more accessible to people and institutions around the world," Nvidia chief executive officer Jensen Huang said. Many of the most popular open AI models are made by Chinese companies such as Moonshot AI, DeepSeek and Alibaba. Rather than spending millions in fees to use a closed model, developers can download one of the Chinese systems and build their products on top of it, paying mainly for servers.