Our position on open-weights models

Schrödinger's China at once is an evil entity looking to use AI for their own nefarious purposes yet also willing to cooperate with their main competitor to prevent other actors (who??) from achieving similar goals (all while under a chip embargo too!!)

The reality is much less confusing: Anthropic CEO does not wish for models with similar (or greater) capabilities compared to his own closed and overpriced ones to be widely released. Simply because that will affect Anthropic's bottom-line.

Anthropic and all other "model" companies have nothing making them special beyond privileged access to chips so obviously they want to restrict what models are out there and more importantly who can produce new ones. Without these restrictions, it's only a matter of time before the multi-hundred billions valuations simply evaporate while they are still holding the bag.

Ban distillation of our outputs, but our distillation of the sum-total of civilisation's intellectual output – proprietary or otherwise – is fair use?

Either everyone licenses, or nobody does. And if you can't enforce licensing bans for everyone, the de-facto loser is those who you'd probably want to support the most, start-ups and universities, while your adversaries gain the upper hand.

The strongest argument for restricting distillation is arms control – but distillation is the way to defeat GPU embargoes. So, distillation goes on regardless. Only pre-training is seriously attenuated.

If we're honest, the models are compressions of everything society has ever written. A few large corporations can't own that, no more than they can claim copyright for a zip file of the public library.

The genie is out of the bottle, now. So open it up – inputs and outputs, forward-looking – for everyone.

Someone who until yesterday did not seem bothered by his technology being possibly used to bomb elementary girls school in another country seems to suddenly care about the repression of citizens in yet another country.

No, we don't buy your virtue signaling. And we certainly don't need your better-than-thou opinions on this year's "nightmare scenarios".

In the first paragraph,

> Anyone who has read my past writing should know that I don’t regard such bans as a useful measure,

Later (on banning chip sales to china)

> we should crack down on the rampant smuggling and workarounds used to obtain access to such chips.

If you truly believe that bans don't work, the same applies to hardware too.

Furthermore, Dario says later "To address these concerns, I do support the following three measures...": 1. ban chip sales to China 2. crack down on distillation 3. all capable models should go through mandatory safety testing

Just so happens that all these moves commercially benefit Anthropic. If Dario really wanted to make a point, it would land a lot better had Anthropic released a single open-weights model

I can't remember the last time (if ever) a company managed to go from golden goose to.. whatever this is.. so quickly. The permanent defensiveness in his presentation is really hard to swallow, it actively puts me off wanting to believe in or rely on their product line with Dario at the helm. I don't even understand the logic leading up to this post. Who was it even hoping to convince. Is it possible Anthropic is due an oil change?

> Anthropic has never advocated for a ban on open-weights models.

> All sufficiently capable models, open and closed, should go through mandatory safety testing.

Yeah, this is anthropic advocating for a ban on open weight models.

Who runs this test? What happens if this test is too costly or the administrator refuses to allow certain people to participate.

This is exactly how the US has banned goods in the past, by requiring a stamp and then refusing to issue it.

To everyone here pushing for total proliferation of open models -- what should be done about open weight bioweapon and cyber-offense capabilities? Is it simply the cost of freedom that we should allow attackers to access these tools? The OpenAI / Hugging Face incident shows what a GPT 5.6 level model can do off the leash; within ~6 months, open weight models will match this and every bad actor under the sun will be able to pull off attacks at this scale. Do you seriously want this level of capabilities to be generally available with no guardrails?

The open weight issue has a lot of difficult nuance. Biasing toward supporting openness makes sense and is a good instinct, but it's incredibly naive to be absolutely in favor of it in every circumstance without seriously thinking about its implications.

To me, the most weasel words are “”All sufficiently capable models, open and closed, should go through mandatory safety testing.””

I bet via regulatory capture that evaluating Chinese models will be a very slow process if Dario gets his way.

I enjoy using Opus, but I am in the process of ripping it out of my toolkit and leaving it on the ground behind me, as I walk away.

So the argument is basically: This technology is too dangerous so only _we_ should have access to it. We’re the good guys and only we can ensure a safe use of this technology.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Booo! "authoritarian hands". Scary

Its not like current US regime is using AI for: 1) Mass military operations across the globe 2) Mass surveilance of its citizens 3) Removing every possible safety guard from AI/climate regulation 4) Stealing data across the world to train its own closed-source models 5) Is openly antidemocratic, destabilizing EU and economy of whole world

I wonder why company which is actively cooperating with the current regime would push such message

Oh no! The evil CCP is a huge threat to world peace and goodness! Give all your money and input token data to Palantir to support a rules based world order where the good guys thrive and cleanse the earth from crooked turtle biologists.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jun/20/mona-khalil-tu...

Every single risk he identifies as a concern regarding China is exactly my concerns with the US having absolute control. Literally the exact same concerns

Considering the state of the current US Administration, its impossible for me to take cries of national security and worries about abuse from "authoritarian governments" seriously

What Dario misses time and time again, is that people don't trust the US to create aligned AI anymore. His entire strategy rests on the assumption that the US (and their government) are exceptional.

This is clearly false to the rest of the world.

Yeah anything China does is evil. We are seeing what the so called "democratic" USA is doing. Anthropic and by extension USA wants a monopoly like they had for Jets and other influencing technolgies.

I think China building and releasing models to Opensource is a greater good because that is providing equal accessibility to everyone in the world.

By Dario's words authoritarian regime vis a vis China, I think OpenAI and Anthropic are also authoritarian in similar terms.

We are only seeing what they want us to show, they might be creating models which can do more harm.

So claiming that China can do or might do, vs Anthropic will not is just words.

Yeah I agree with the final paragraph that we should have testing agencies mandated world wide for each frontier model testing.