If you want people to copy it, but want a 20 year temporary monopoly, you can publish an open source step-by-step guide for someone to recreate what you’re doing with the patent office.

And crucially, you should want to others to build upon it, like you build upon so many that came before you.

Anthropic and OpenAI have proven themselves to be aspiring monopolists through their positions and actions. Why would you want to share your research with them?

For researchers, yes.

For startups, no, because the point of that is to make money.

That's not really a common attitude in academia, unfortunately.

The most common attitude is something closer to "I want to be well known and respected by smart and influential people". In short, prestige.

People using your work is a side effect of success, but simultaneously threatens your ownership of your "brand". If they significantly improve upon the thing you did, your work could be made irrelevant, your prestige ruined.

There seems to be this mentality among a large number of people who publish open data/research/software that everything is fine as long as no one else makes money using it. The second that happens, they're furious and act as though someone unfairly profited off of their "unpaid labor" (read: that thing they did purely for the love of the game). I think it has to be some sort of feeling of resentment and/or stupidity that _they_ were the person with a million dollar idea that let it slip through their fingers.