Anthropic specifically is clearly trying to get the US government to ban open weight models for anticompetitive reasons. So making LLMs seem (or be!) dangerous aligns with their interests very well.
Ban means what? That the entire world (ex USA) can use open-weight models? Not a win.
I agree. I hope developers put their token budgets into open weight models rather than funding the banning of open weight models.
100% agree. I think OAI is too, but more subtly.
Both have taken huge amounts of investment money, and those shareholders will come knocking for their returns at some point.
They make money on token use, but that’s hard to do when China is launching models that are 80-90% as capable, cost 1/10th, and can be deployed for “free”.
I imagine they’re also pissed that most of the Chinese models are distilled from their own (the irony being that they scraped the entire internet to train their own ones).
Cryptography, DeCSS ... we have a long history of trying to block things like this and it simply not working.
There is a long, convoluted set of legal arguments that are going to make the weights of a model "facts", rather than "code" making it even harder to "ban". Furthermore having them not be "facts" is going to open up a whole other legal argument about what they are and what the attribution is.
I suspect that they are fishing for a case, so a judge can set some precedent.
That's my view. The end goal is to become Too Big To Fail, the means is stifling the competition and getting military funding.