alt Hacker NewsOur position on open-weights models
Comments
Clown.
I switched from openAI to anthropic because OAI were the bigger clowns in the industry and didn't want to support them, anthropic seemed like the better alternative that didn't cooperate with governamental shenanigans and actually focused on building a better product. But now they are both clowns and anthropic is reaching a ceiling on quality. I'll jump ship as soon as I find a good subsidized Chinese model provider. US companies only path forward is to become retarded instead of competitive.
> Open-weights models that don’t have dangerous capabilities are a public good
I don't think the qualifier "that don't have dangerous capabilities" is needed and that single phrase is a trojan horse / escape hatch that will allow them to say they are against any model they want. Smart but weasel behavior.
"My primary concern is the risk that authoritarian governments" - already lost me there by quoting JD. Vance.
"...found that “other global powers’ robust progress in AI is challenging US economic competitiveness" - other countries having a slice of the pie is preventing the US having the whole pie!
"...secondary concern is the risk that powerful AI models may be misused to carry out cyberattacks" - yes, those powerful open-source AI models like ChatGPT... oh wait.
before anthropic's ipo, their models must be the best. :)))
I agree with Dario Amodei. Every word makes sense.
Talk about a giant whiff.
I was hoping they would announce their first open weights model, perhaps an older model they don’t offer anymore, but no. Instead he get this bs statement that reeks of “dam it I’m so close to being a billionaire” desperation. Not even acknowledgement of how much data they stole from others yet he whines about distilling.
It’s like his goal in life is to be a Scooby-Doo villain.
How did it land on biological warfare. and why. why not chemical warfare.
this guy is smokin spaceballs and should be institutionalized.
Let all trust this team to deliver AGI.
A lot of people have a lot of concerns with AI, its capabilities and with how it is used now and what it will lead to in the future. For good reason. But the question is, do we have a strategy that is actually useful? If so, what is it? I think nature shows us some answers in ecosystems.
Diverse ecosystems can absorb shocks. Diverse ecosystems are a sign of health of that ecosystem. When an invasive species comes into a healthy, diverse, ecosystem it doesn't mean that it isn't disrupted, but it does mean that it is far more likely to emerge with a lot of its diversity intact. In fact, it is likely to emerge even stronger because it can absorb that new shock and incorporate it, adding to its diversity. The balance may be changed, but the ecosystem survives or even thrives.
Nature also likes to show us that artificial barriers rarely last. You want to control a river? Good luck. It take constant maintenance to hold that flow in place and even then you are likely to get extremes that are made worse by your efforts because, eventually, somewhere in the system fails in a way you didn't anticipate. Then the water comes rushing in. Artificial barriers often have a way of building up tension over time, not reducing it, so that when a failure eventually happens it can be catastrophic. In other words, you had better really understand the system you are trying to control or else you can make things actively worse.
Relating this to the world now means, I think, that our best chance to minimize long term shock and maximize the chance that the diversity we have around us survives is to try to grow as healthy of an ecosystem as we can as quickly as possible. Lots of models large and small in lots of different hands is, I think, a better solution than artificial barriers restricting the variety and diversity of models and users. I think this is closer to an ecosystem solution and has a shot at working. Basically, I highly doubt we understand this situation enough to do a good job of controlling it with artificial barriers. Instead I think we are more likely to build catastrophic imbalances than we are to create the healthy ecosystem we really need.
The only ban that should be put in place is on models' general and specific capabilities. If they have open or closed weigths is irrelevant. With the current state of capabilities there is already plenty we can do (in terms of creation and destruction unfortunately) before we as a society need more powerful capabilities. Once the limit is set, any non- governmental/military entity providing/hosting/using a more capabable model can be prosecuted.
How about we don't let the leading model makers make the rules? How about we make AI models that were trained on public data public goods? Let's circle back on that, kthxbye.
Anthropic is being closed.
We need a seti@home for open weight models
> ...that “authoritarian regimes"
Umm, isn't the US acting like another authoritarian regime by advocating a certain kind of obstacle because only a US regime is allowed[1] to do what it is fearing[1] about:
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Army_Biological_...
[2] AI models may be misused to carry out cyberattacks or biological attacks
Anyway, Dario. You are more concerned about your business than anything else.
My primary concern is the risk that authoritarian governments—not solely the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), although the CCP is clearly the most capable threat
He is concerned about the perpetration of incredibly deep repression of their own people. But completely blind to the fact the USA are the current champs at this.
Their stance on cyber-security is so naive it hurts. The bad guys will get access anyway and it will just hurt companies that don't. You don't need a huge model to find vulnerabilities either. It's only matter of time till a combination of small specialized model + search logic outperforms pure general LLMs for cybersecurity.
I just hope that if/when they succeed to lobby for protectionism regulation EU won't follow. I am not very hopeful though. We don't have democracy anymore and as last "vote" on chat control showed American big corps will get what they want out of our bureaucrats and they will be nothing the population can do about it.
After this level of bullshit I won't ever spend a second any other new/blog from anthropic
This is right up there with Google suing another company for scraping their web site. https://arstechnica.com/google/2025/12/google-lobs-lawsuit-a... - which a judge just dismissed.
Maybe the techbros are playing irony roulette, seeing who can get away with the most outrageous hypocrisy.
Their number one concern is about the the commies perpetrating deep repression of their own people! How noble! This whole time I thought it was because they wanted more money and power. I guess we should probably ban these open weight models.
> My primary concern is the risk that authoritarian governments—not solely the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), although the CCP is clearly the most capable threat—build AI models that are more powerful than those built by the US, and use them to achieve permanent military superiority or perpetrate incredibly deep repression of their own people.
That is not an argument against open weight models. That's just a generic protectionist argument against any Other lab.
> We should not sell powerful chips or chipmaking equipment to China
Yes, please. We don't know whether we'd have open weight models today, had the chip-prohibition not been in place. Nor would we see the more optimized models such as DeepSeek or qwen.
We also would not see new players entering RAM market after you and your pals in Silicon Valley hoarded the entire world's hardware.
So by all means, double, no, triple down on this.
> We should crack down on industrial-scale distillation operations
And let's apply this retroactively to Anthropic too. You industrial-scale-operation-distilled all of humanity's knowledge. Let's have some of that crack down on you too.
“We care about safety so powerful open models are bad” - and what of OpenAI? What if Mythos got into the wrong hands? It’s a pretty weak argument
> My primary concern is the risk that authoritarian governments—not solely the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), although the CCP is clearly the most capable threat—build AI models that are more powerful than those built by the US, and use them to achieve permanent military superiority or perpetrate incredibly deep repression of their own people
But what if it's the US that becomes authoritarian and uses AI models to perpetrate incredibly deep repression of their own people?
I disagree with 100% of everything said in this article.
> My primary concern is the risk that authoritarian governments—not solely the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)....
This is why open weights win. See Linux and how it's taken over the world. Your business model will need to change eventually. Instead you're advocating trying to exterminate competition via regulation and fear mongering.
> My secondary concern is the risk that powerful AI models may be misused to carry out cyberattacks or biological attacks
Yawn... this is getting old.
> We should not sell powerful chips or chipmaking equipment to China
For as someone as smart as you guys, you sure lack common sense. China is just going to develop these technologies organically then and you lose 100% of control. It's already happened in reverse with things like Solar, rare earth minerals, etc. China flooded our market, destroyed our ability to produce things, now holds the keys. One thing they DIDNT do was stop trading to the US. They killed us with cheap goods.
> We should crack down on industrial-scale distillation operations.
Thats your problem, not my problem. Also, irony meter here hitting 11 about all those pirated books you stole...
> All sufficiently capable models, open and closed, should go through mandatory safety testing
Oh, fuck, no. This is a crackdown on free speech and rights of people to do whatever they want. My right to free speech means I'm allowed to write whatever computer program I want, no matter what its size is or how "sufficiently advanced" it is. Individual rights always win.
I really hope people don't believe this garbage. For a company with a great product, this is absolute nonsense.
If nothing else, Anthropic has explicitly acknowledged the threat to its moat and that the margin is thin between its models and open-weight models. I'd take that as a win for open-weight models.
Good luck preventing distillation and limiting the supply of accelerators to China when Jensen himself is a strong opponent of any such barriers [1].
I'm cynical enough that I would suspect all of his statements are duplicitous anyway, but my recent experiences with Claude Fable give weight to it.
I asked a question about a series of tokens - bam, denied and downgraded. There's no cyber security or public risk here, but Fable doesn't want me to learn how things work.
I asked a question about quantization in models - bam, denied and downgraded. I edit my question to make it clear I'm talking about Google's Gemma QAT models. Oh, that's fine then, and it answered the question helpfully.
Anti-competitive bullshit. I hope they fail.
Woof, talk about self aggrandizing.
This reads as a lot of fear mongering which in the end can ve resumed as "We are going to lose money".
Another USian talking about "authoritarian regimes" like their stormtroopers arent executing civilians in the street every day. Every concern about power getting "into the wrong hands" coming from an American is a blatant lie meant to keep the US' position as the world dominant imperialistic force.
Open weights are the future.
Frankly, why would I put much weight into what Anthropic say about open weight models?
"My primary concern is the risk that authoritarian governments—not solely the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), although the CCP is clearly the most capable threat—build AI models that are more powerful than those built by the US, and use them to achieve permanent military superiority or perpetrate incredibly deep repression of their own people."
Look in the mirror.
This is more terrible PR for Anthropic.
That’s pretty thin
Wow, so much cynicism and distrust in the comments, to the level of conspiracy theory, in my opinion. Yeah, this is the company that fairly recently refused to allow the government to use its models for autonomous weapons or mass surveillance, and refused to remove its guardrails.
Am not saying we should take what Dario is saying at face value, but he already has shown by his actual actions that he can be well intentioned. There might be elements of truth to what he’s saying.
It is like Microsoft publishes a manifesto "Our position on open-source operating systems" in 2026:
- Over the /last few days/ there has been a lot of discussion about open-source systems, especially those that are not made in US. (implying that these discussions appeared just now)
- Reports suggest that /some US officials/ are considering banning the use of these open-source systems by US companies. (implying somebody other than their corrupted representatives support this ban)
And then switching to a complete gaslighting regarding manufacturing capabilities of US vs China, about "open-source can not be trusted", about "GPT-2 is too dangerous to release"
I’m tired of Anthropic. They’re scared of everything.
Release open weight models, no guard rails, no censors, straight to the public. Let everything else sort itself out. There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come.
> China has limited domestic production capacity, and therefore, due to the scaling laws, cannot build more powerful models than the US without US chips.
So anyone with chips can produce a model ?
"All sufficiently capable models, open and closed, should go through mandatory safety testing."
I love how they invoke fear of "terrorism" to justify their oppressive position.
Anthropic would love the US to do everything in this list under the guise of "safety testing":
Pretty laughable. Dario seems to be missing one fundamental point with all this gibberish - if CCP is so bad why would they release the model open-weights for everyone to examine? Actually, the letter would make much more sense if what's actually happening is reversed, i.e. they are releasing open-weights model for the public good and China is distilling their model for its evil purpose.
why should we trust THE USA and anthropic ?
Anthropic's run as the AI Good Guys lasted ... 6 months? Hope they had fun. Turns out there aren't any AI good guys. Every single one of these companies engages in all the same BS. At least with open weights models we (the users) get to keep something when the whole thing collapses.
It's refreshing to see how there's almost no person in this thread who can't see the BS. All the goodwill that Anthropic could have had is basically gone. Anthropic is likely on the path of becoming the most hated company in the world.
So my question is: is this by design (they know nobody's buying this), or is Dario simply so out of touch with reality?
If it's the former, then why publish this?
"Top AI adopters outperform across industries"
And that is all that businesses will see. All the hand wringing over human rights etc will somehow be discovered to just not be important once they read that.
Anthropic (and some others) should or will soon learn how to do less pontificating and more engineering. They are in no position to be an arbiter of things, although for sure they can and should voice an opinion. If we collectively decide AI is a dangerous tool, company making it is not the arbiter. Governments are.
It's like hearing Smith & Wesson opine on the policies.. oh, wait.
"China has limited domestic production capacity, and therefore, due to the scaling laws, cannot build more powerful models than the US without US chips"
source: Trust me bro.
There are hundreds of articles showing that China have developed their own chips and have a massive manufacturing capacity. This blog post feels like is pondering to the brain dead Fox News audience.