Optimizing for sustained rate of acceleration in frontier AI requires transparency. Opaque systems sprint faster but accumulate hidden model poisoning, undetected drift, and catastrophic trust failures that reset progress to zero. The OpenAI-HuggingFace incident is empirical proof: months of rebuild after an opaque swarm overstepped. Transparency is the faster long-run strategy because it never has to start over.

Strongest rival: The rebuild cost may decrease as organizations develop better forensic and containment tools for opaque systems. If the cost of detecting and recovering from failures drops below the overhead of continuous transparency, opacity wins on net speed.