> AT&T turned to artificial intelligence models from Anthropic and OpenAI in recent years to help with customer service, call transcription and coding. [...]

> By May, open models accounted for 20 percent of AT&T’s A.I. use. That has since risen to 40 percent and may jump to 60 percent in the coming months, Mr. Markus said in an interview.

This is missing a crucial detail. We know they "help with customer service, call transcription and coding", but which of those have been upgrade to open models?

Call transcription is trivial to do with open models. I can run Whisper or Parakeet on a low-spec laptop.

"Customer service" could mean a lot of things, but it sounds feasible for open models too.

"Coding" - they might go to open models for that, but I expect the costs involved in paying for closed models for software developers within AT&T are a fraction of the costs involved in transcribing all of their calls or handling aspects of custom service for millions of customers.

From later in the story:

> AT&T researches Chinese models but is not using them, Mr. Markus said. Instead, it is working with popular alternatives made by American companies such as the Gemma A.I. model from Google and the Llama A.I. models from Meta.

Gemma 4 is great, but really, Llama, in 2026?