alt Hacker NewsI know it's unpopular, or unfashionable, but I agree with this letter.
LLMs are becoming so powerful that they are dangerous. We've seen last week with the OpenAI hacking (by mistake) Hugging Face debacle.
It is absolutely ok to have open weight models at the level of GPT-OSS-100B. That one was released one year ago, and I think it's still a strong one. GLM 5.2 is a whole new level, but it appears to still be safe. Maybe Kimi K3 will be ok too. But beyond that, things will start being dicey.
It's easy to dismiss this and claim that Dario Amodei is just looking to fatten his pockets. And, sure, if Anthropic manages to put the brakes on open weight models, that reduces the competitive pressure it feels. But that does not make what Amodei's argument incorrect.
Replies
but what is the point? A ban is supposed to make a certain thing less likely to occur. Does a ban of open source models do that? Presumably, the behavior you are trying to limit is the miss-use of these models but I don't know how many state sponsored hacking groups are going to give a ban a second thought.
> We've seen last week with the OpenAI hacking (by mistake) Hugging Face debacle.
If the biggest danger of LLMs is that they can hack traditional systems, there is no significant threat to humanity posed by releasing them in open-weight form. Security doesn't become less of a problem by making hacking even more criminal. That's what's an unsafe mindset looks like.