Automakers including General Motors Co. and Hyundai Motor Co. reported higher US auto sales as the threat of price hikes from President Donald Trump’s tariffs drove consumers to showrooms.

GM’s deliveries soared 17% in the first quarter, with a 15% gain in retail volume, the company said Tuesday. Ford Motor Co. saw retail sales rise while Toyota Motor Corp. reported slight growth in the first three months of the year.

The past weekend was “by far the best weekend I’ve seen in a very long time,” Randy Parker, the chief executive officer of Hyundai and Genesis in North America, told reporters. “Lots of people rushed in this weekend, especially to try and beat the tariffs.”

The just-ended quarter may end up being the last of relative normalcy before the industry is upended by Trump’s 25% tariffs on passenger-vehicle imports that take effect this week. Cars assembled overseas account for about half of US auto sales. And even cars made domestically often use a significant amount of non-US parts, some of which may also be subject to levies.

Researchers including Edmunds and Cox Automotive had predicted volumes would likely get a boost from anxious shoppers buying before prices potentially rise.

“The prospect of tariffs is already beginning to affect the industry,” Thomas King, president of data and analytics at JD Power, said in a statement. March results were “particularly strong, enabled by consumers accelerating purchases to avoid potential tariff-related price increases.”

Hyundai saw record sales for the latest month and quarter, buoyed by double-digit gains in demand for its best-selling Tucson small SUV and Elantra compact sedan. For the first three months, Hyundai said Tuesday that it saw a 10% gain in deliveries to 203,554 vehicles, boosted by a 13% jump last month. 

Sister brand Kia Corp. similarly posted record sales, with an 11% rise in the January to March period to 198,850 vehicles. Buyers snapped up its compact Sportage SUV and new K4 sedan.

GM’s sales in March were strong, a company spokesman said, though it’s difficult to quantify how much came from buyers trying to get ahead of Trump’s tariffs. The Detroit-based automaker’s big gains came from freshened versions of the Chevrolet Colorado mid-size pickup, which was up 73%, while sales of the Chevy Traverse mid-sized SUV rose 62%.

Toyota sales grew 7.7% in March, but less than 1% in the year-to-date period. Deliveries of the Japanese automaker’s best-selling RAV4 compact SUV and Camry midsize sedan declined during the latest month and quarter. The two models are Toyota’s top sellers and inventories are tight, a US-based spokesman for the carmaker said. 

Sales of Lexus luxury brand vehicles rose 5.8% in March and 14% in the January-March period.

Ford saw a 5% quarterly gain in retail sales and 19% jump in March alone. But overall volume slipped 1.3% in the first quarter to 498,480 units, excluding heavy trucks. That was largely due to lower rental fleet sales and the discontinuation of two models, the company said.

Honda reported a 5% rise in first—quarter sales and a 13% jump in March across its namesake brand and Acura luxury vehicle lines. Deliveries of the Japanese carmaker’s top-selling CR-V crossover grew 9% in the quarter and 24% last month.

Tesla Inc. is expected to detail its global delivery numbers for the most recent quarter on Wednesday.

Tariff Threats

Representatives of several large US automakers have been lobbying the Trump administration to exclude certain low-cost car components from the planned tariffs, Bloomberg News reported Monday.

While it’s not clear how new costs will be distributed between automakers, suppliers and car buyers, prices are expected to rise considerably. A recent study by Anderson Economic Group found that the tariffs could increase the cost to build vehicles by as much as $12,000. That could make some models unviable in the US, particularly at the lower end of the market.

Sales of Chevy’s South Korea-made Trax small SUV rose 57%. That vehicle faces a 25% tariff starting April 3.

GM’s electric-vehicle sales nearly doubled in the quarter, led by its Mexico-made Chevy Blazer and Equinox EVs. Those models would be hit by tariffs on their non-US parts content if Trump sticks to his original plan.

Dealers have seen a surge in demand from would-be buyers worried about prices. Chevrolet dealer Duane Paddock said GM sent an unusually large amount of inventory to meet the buyer interest.

US dealerships are sitting on about 60 to 90 days of inventory on average, providing them with a cushion against the immediate effects of the tariffs.

“It has created an urgency to buy it now before there’s a price increase,” Rhett Ricart, a dealer of Ford, Chevrolet, Hyundai and other brands in Columbus, Ohio, said.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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To judge by his social feeds, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is a very happy camper, as his company notches one eye-popping success after another. The startup he co-founded in 2015 just raised $40 billion at a $300 billion valuation, the biggest funding round ever by a private tech company; everyone on the internet seems to be posting Studio Ghibli-style images courtesy of OpenAI’s new GPT-4o image generation model; and ChatGPT now has 500 million weekly users, up from 400 million last month. 

And yet, along with all this good news, Altman revealed Monday that OpenAI is making what appears to be a pretty big about-face in its strategy: In several months, Altman said, OpenAI will be releasing an open source model. 

The move would mark the first time the company has released a model openly since the launch of GPT-2 in 2019, seemingly reversing the company’s shift to closed models in recent years. Granted, the forthcoming model will not be 100% open — as with other companies offering “open” AI models, including Meta and Mistral, OpenAI will offer no access to the data used to train the model. Still, the usage license would allow researchers, developers, and other users to access the underlying code and “weights” of the new model (which determine how the model processes information) to use, modify, or improve it. 

Why the turnaround?

On its surface, the direct cause of OpenAI’s open source embrace might appear to come from China, specifically, the emergence of startup DeepSeek, which flipped the AI script in favor of open-source in January. But according to several AI industry insiders that Fortune spoke to, a broader, and more nuanced, set of factors is also likely motivating Altman’s change of heart on open source. As AI technology makes its way into businesses, customers want the flexibility and transparency of open source models for many uses. And as the performance gap between OpenAI and its competitors narrows, it’s become more difficult for OpenAI to justify its 100% closed approach–something Altman acknowledged in January when he admitted that DeepSeek had lessened OpenAI’s lead in AI, that OpenAI has been “on the wrong side of history” when it comes to open sourcing its technologies.

OpenAI needs a presence beyond the models

Naveen Rao, VP of artificial intelligence at Databricks, said OpenAI’s move is more about an admission that the AI landscape is changing. Value is shifting away from the models themselves to the applications or systems organizations use to customize a model to their specific needs. While there are many situations where a company might want to use a state-of-the-art LLM, an open weights model would allow OpenAI to have a presence in scenarios where customers to don’t want to use ChatGPT, for example, or the company’s developer API. For example, a financial company might not want their customer data to leave their own infrastructure and move to an outside cloud, or a manufacturing business might want AI embedded in factory hardware that is not connected to the internet. 

“Open source is not some curiosity, it’s a big part of AI usage,” he told me. “OpenAI wants to be a part of that through their brand and their models.” 

Rowan Curran, a senior analyst at Forrester Research focused on AI, agreed, saying that OpenAI’s return to open source speaks to AI’s increasingly-diverse ecosystem, from OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Amazon to Meta to China’s Alibaba and DeepSeek, France’s Mistral, Canada’s Cohere and Israel’s AI21 Labs.

He said many enterprise companies are excited about open-source AI models — not just because of how accurate they are or how well they answer questions, but because they’re flexible. The fact that they are portable is key, he explained — meaning they can run on different cloud platforms or even on a company’s own data center, workstation, laptop or robot, instead of being tied to one provider. 

Curran also explained that releasing an open model could make OpenAI’s own services more appealing to its own enterprise customers. If OpenAI is building a project for a customer and needs to run some of their work within the company’s own data center or even smaller models, for example, they can’t do that with OpenAI models like 4o because those run off of cloud-based servers. “That limits their ability to provide an end-to-end solution from the cloud all the way to the edge,” whether that is a laptop, a smartphone, a robot or a self-driving car, he said. Similar to what Google does with Gemini (it’s largest closed model family) and Gemma (it’s smaller open model), OpenAI could have its own open solution without having to look at third-party open source models. 

A tricky balancing act

While Rao does not see an open source OpenAI model as a big reaction to the DeepSeek releases, the “DeepSeek moment” did show that Chinese startups are no longer behind in the AI race. 

“Many of us in the field already knew this,” he said. If OpenAI doesn’t target the open source community now, he added, “it will lose a lot of influence, goodwill and community innovation.” 

Previously, OpenAI had said that one reason they could not release open models is because Chinese firms would try to use their technology to improve their own models. In January, OpenAI released a statement that said “it is critically important that we are working closely with the U.S. government to best protect the most capable models from efforts by adversaries and competitors to take U.S. technology.” And in fact, while DeepSeek did not release the data it used to train its R1 model, there are indications that it may have used outputs from OpenAI’s o1 to kick-start the training of the model’s reasoning abilities.

As OpenAI now tacks towards open source again, it’s found itself trying to reconcile seemingly contradictory messages. Witness OpenAI Chief Global Affairs Officer Chris Lehane’s LinkedIn post  on Monday: “For US-led democratic AI to prevail over CCP-led authoritarian AI, it’s becoming increasingly clear that we need to strike a balance between open and closed models. Open source puts powerful tools into the hands of developers around the world, expanding the reach of democratic AI principles and enabling innovators everywhere to solve hard problems and drive economic growth. Closed models incorporate important safeguards that protect America’s strategic advantage and prevent misuse.” 

“They’re definitely talking out of both sides,” Rao said,  describing OpenAI’s messaging as “it’s still really dangerous [to release open models] but we need to take advantage of the community that is building and has influence.” 

There’s also a commercial balancing act for OpenAI: It can’t release an open model that competes with its own paid ones. To target AI developers with influence, Rao suggested OpenAI would release a model that is big – but not too big. 

Throwing shade at Meta

If OpenAI’s strategic move to open source a model isn’t solely in reaction to DeepSeek, it may very well be about throwing shade at another big open source competitor: Meta is set to release the fourth iteration of its open source model family, Llama, at the end of this month. Llama has notably been released with an open license except for services with more than 700 million monthly active users–meant to limit companies like OpenAI building on it. 

“We will not do anything silly like saying that you can’t use our open model if your service has more than 700 million monthly active users,” Altman posted yesterday on X. 

“Meta has become the standard bearer for open source AI, at least in the west,” said Rao. “If they want to wrestle away some influence in the ecosystem, they have to take on Meta.” 

However, Forrester’s Curran said that Altman’s vague comments aside, there is no reason to think that OpenAI’s open source model will be any more transparent–in terms of data or training methods, for example–than any other commercial open version from Meta or Mistral. 

“I expect it to be much more opaque and closed compared to other open models,” he said, “with significantly less transparency.” 

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com