alt Hacker NewsOur position on open-weights models
Comments
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.
> We should not sell powerful chips or chipmaking equipment to China
And accelerate their development of independent chip making technologies even more…
At least try to release one open weight before you say anything, or all of that only sound hypocrite at best.
Their position seems fair to me - sure it does help them as well, but I don't necessarily disagree with the risk they are laying out.
"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."
Hmmmm.
Hey, no fair stealing the value thay we already stole fair and square!
distillation: Pirates people’s lifetime of copyrighted work, makes billions selling access to it through APIs, then tells us we can only use it in ways they approve.
> Anthropic has never advocated for a ban on open-weights models.
If you wonder why this is written as an opening to a list of reasons that advocate for banning the open weight models, it’s because
I agree with Dario Amodei. Every word makes sense.
"Open-weights models that don’t have dangerous capabilities are a public good"
Read between the lines folks. Anthropic deems every model that has frontier capabilities as "dangerous", and thus they are against them. We all know that "dangerous" simply means "whatever model hurts our bottom line."
More dishonest framing from the company that constantly lies to everyone. No surprises here.
This seems hypocritical, out of touch, and hollow. "Safety testing" is just a hair away from censorship when it comes to government control.
Perhaps, the general public needs to formulate its position on Anthropic models...
The consent factory has never been more productive.
When they use ill gotten data for training their models the world's smallest violin plays when they complain about distillation attacks.
> In fact, the most dangerous model may be one that is trained in secret and handed only to the People’s Liberation Army for use in drones and the Ministry of State Security for surveillance and repression.
Welcome to bizarro world!
Fist off: "the most dangerous model may be one that is trained in secret" <-- Says the guy that not only restricts commercial use for some of their models but develops them in utter secrecy. With the pretext of guardrails. Then show us the guardrails you really use by opening the weights.
Second: "use in drones [...] for surveillance and repression" <-- writes the King of FUD, as the US is an an active campaign with the help of their models. And/or OpenAI's.
I am very appreciative of the freedoms of the west but this type of hypocrisy and lack of self-awareness is bonkers and it should be called out.
> Open-weights models that don’t have dangerous capabilities are a public good
Note the hedging against 'dangerous capabilities'. Undoubtedly, all the useful ones trigger this condition in Anthropic's eyes. The rest of the post is filled with similar weasel-wording. Make no mistake, this absolutely confirms that Anthropic is against open models in the sense that any reasonable person understands them.
The way the rest of the post unabashedly appeals to the current US administration's China hysteria is hilarious, and not at all subtle.
I guess we'll see about all the doomsaying here, won't we? Kimi K3 is frontier-level, and there's no stopping it now. As far as the world is concerned, anyway. If the US wants to kneecap itself that's another matter.
A sober look at actual rogue nations and their use of AI shouldn’t have us fretting over that particular hemisphere
he's asking for the most powerful models to be in the hands of the few while the majority will be at their mercy.
"In fact, the most dangerous model may be one that is trained in secret and handed only to the People’s Liberation Army for use in drones and the Ministry of State Security for surveillance and repression."
I'm so sick of all this anti-China shilling. There's zero chance that whomever is in power in the U.S. won't use AI in drones and in FBI/CIA/local Police/etc., for surveillance and repression right here in the good old U.S.A too. These government use cases for AI are both sides of the same coin.
China fear-mongering by business leaders only happens from businesses that have something to gain by it. Obviously, Anthropic fits the bill in this regard.
Generational good will loss from these guys.
Do distilled models have to inherit guardrails? Can a model distilled from a “safe” model be made unsafe?
I wonder if publishing these documents is not just a public stunt, but heavily integrated with Anthropic's business storategy to maximize operational efficiency. Companies often have several internal documents for a single policy like "position on open-weight models", one for public (like this), others for the legal team, the lobbyist, the developers, the investors, etc. The differences and nuances of those manuals can be very huge and are necessary to maximize the goal from each branch, but often a cause of headaches like bureaucracy, communication friction, outdated information, etc.
A single canonical official document can make it very simple. Even though each department cannot achieve the maximum gain from nuanced documents, keeping operational context as simple as possible may really improve LLM driven operations to move faster and cut cost.
If "publishing pleasant positions and actually following them in general" becomes a good business storategy in LLM driven society, it can be one of very few good outcomes from this dystopian AI craze.
The Roman empire fell for the same reason, didn't it!? They wanted to control it all ... But it was too big
As an act of good faith and proof, they could stop spending the record-breaking lobbying money for couple years.
I think he asked LLM to rephrase "I want open models to be banned, but sound like I don't want it but mean it somehow".
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.
> We should crack down on industrial-scale distillation operations.
IP for me, not for thee.
Anthropic’s second biggest issue is they increasingly rent when others buy. Even if model value compresses, owning your vertical stack protects your margins upstream, and potentially downstream in applications.
But the biggest issue is this. Many hate Dario because he’s smug, he caps usage, and because OpenAI effectively ran a counter-positioning campaign to paint Anthropic as undemocratic.
Who is he really and what are his motives? None of you know, really.
He wants to restrict China from access to chips. All that will do will accelerate their development of competing, sovereign hardware.
As an example take North Korea. Sanctions didn't stop them from developing nukes and delivery systems.
We need a seti@home for open weight models
> Anthropic has never advocated for a ban on open-weights models.
What are the legal ramifications of this statement if it turns out Anthropic have lobbied for this? Does it just get swept under the rug? I can't say this is bullshit (that would be defamatory) but I am intensely skeptical.
> China has limited domestic production capacity, and therefore, due to the scaling laws, cannot build more powerful models than the US without US chips.
This is playing to readers' biases; isn't DeepSeek V4 Pro deployed on Huawei Ascend already? The old "Chinese can only copy" meme is getting pretty tired these days.
> All sufficiently capable models, open and closed, should go through mandatory safety testing
Applying such standards in the US means that US defenders are blocked from using the models, but attackers from other countries aren't. That is clearly counterproductive.
It's already been pointed out quite eloquently elsewhere that there is no such thing as a safety filter because the LLM and external filters can't actually identify malicious use. They can only identify the weaker implication "if the user is malicious, this is bad."
> "We should crack down on industrial-scale distillation operations" I'd prefer if there was a crack down on industrial-scale scraping. Maybe even reimbursement for the problems it has caused (some nasty AWS bills, tons of man-hours spent on preventing new nasty AWS bills, etc).
Jesus Dario we get it man, you want clout for the IPO.
This constant whining from anthropic about distillation attacks continues to be rich given the amount of stolen data that went into any Claude variant.
“By virtue of being the good people everything we do is good, and if it happens to be in our best personal and financial interest then that is good too because it enables us to do more good. And if it’s to the detriment to others then it’s because you don’t understand the good behind it. Which is fine, because we’re good and you can trust that what we do is good because what we do is good by virtue of us being the good ones.”
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.
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].
Anthropic starting to sound like Microsoft from the 1990s.
This reads almost dishonestly.
> Anthropic has never advocated for a ban on open-weights models.
This is not an unqualified never. The very next sentence makes a qualified statement: "Open-weights models that don’t have dangerous capabilities are a public good". That prompts the question, what about ones which do have "dangerous capabilities"? Are they not a public good? If not, then should they be banned? Who gets to decide on the definitions of these terms?
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.
Open weights are the future.
> 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.
Imagine chinese regime getting access to powerful models who bombed school students in Iran amusing AI !
"needs safety eval"
also anthropic
"we're upset were not being considered for military contracts"
come on, which is it? Is it all about saftey or is it that only US/Israeli ai is allowed to kill?
Nobody will ever see this but if you're harping on responsibility and your product was created using the world's generational output, your responsibility is to make it as free as the training was as available to protect the world from impact. Greedy schmucks.
"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.
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.
> 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?
Seems pretty reasonable.