How open-source software shapes AI policy

Open-source software quietly affects nearly every issue in AI policy, but it is largely absent from discussions around AI policy--policymakers need to more actively consider OSS's role in AI. Open-source software (OSS), software that is free to access, use, and change without restrictions, plays a central role in the development and use of artificial intelligence (AI). Across open-source programming languages such as Python, R, C, Java, Scala, Javascript, Julia, and others, there are thousands of implementations of machine learning algorithms. OSS frameworks for machine learning, including tidymodels in R and Scikit-learn in Python, have helped consolidate many diverse algorithms into a consistent machine learning process and enabled far easier use for the everyday data scientist. There are also OSS tools specific to the especially important subfield of deep learning, which is dominated by Google's Tensorflow and Facebook's PyTorch.