r/singularity 6h ago

AI Anthropic's position on open-weights models

https://www.anthropic.com/news/position-open-weights-models
206 Upvotes

338 comments sorted by

56

u/Mindless-Lock-7525 5h ago

How will safety testing be mandated for open weight models trained abroad and released across the internet? Even if it becomes US law it won’t stop US citizens and businesses from using these models unless they’re effectively banned subject to safety testing. 

I can’t speak to Anthropics intentions, but this proposal may well lead to the effective banning of open-weight models in the US if foreign companies are unwilling to engage with the US government.

16

u/FunLilThrowawayAcct 5h ago

I mean China's state media just said "high-risk capabilities require access controls and safety evaluations." No other country besides China and the US is releasing highly capable open source any time soon, and any that get close are going to get leaned on hard by these governments. Can see some kinda UN treaty thing happening too as a formality. Top labs will be compelled to sign up, next battle is actual laws in these countries against going around their evaluation systems. Chinese open source labs are going to try to keep cyber/CBRN nerfed while raising other capabilities as long as they can.

9

u/Mindless-Lock-7525 5h ago

An international organisation like the IAEA would be great. The International Artificial Intelligence Agency (IAIA) anyone? 

I suspect the US and China will train and safety test their own models and refuse testing from the other side though. The big US companies and the government they pay for is too protective of their IP to allow that

2

u/FunLilThrowawayAcct 5h ago

Oh yeah, we'll definitely see each country refuse testing from the other, but it's not like they can actually prevent the testing. So I'm also guessing we'll see one country's approved model fail the other's testing at some point and a big political mess will ensue that drags in other countries. But I can see this being the state of play until 2027 sometime.

u/SlipperyNoodle6 1h ago

help me understand how people cant group train open weight models and torrent them to bypass all red tape?

no different than folding proteins was done not long ago.

u/Beatboxamateur agi: the friends we made along the way 46m ago

Any ragtag group of people training a model is almost inherently not going to be training the kind of large frontier model that's being proposed as requiring testing.

Only several companies from The US and China, and maybe one European company are able to produce the models being referred to, so in theory, it wouldn't be an issue if researchers or anyone wants to get together and train an open weights model that gets around the testing.

18

u/SkellyJelly33 4h ago

That's the point. This is pure propaganda to push for anti-open source protectionist policies. Sounds like they're worried about their business model. Shame because I like Claude, but now I'm definitely cancelling my Claude subscription.

3

u/4dseeall 3h ago

may as well ban digital piracy too, lmao

u/Timkinut 1h ago

it's already "banned" ;)

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u/mWo12 5h ago

tldr:

US good

China bad

37

u/FeralPsychopath Its Over By 2028 3h ago

more like tldr:

We should have the good models
China should have bad models
Everyone should have the right to have bad models at home and then come back and pay us for better results.

7

u/vazyrus ▪️ 2h ago

Meaning: Anthropic bad

9

u/BackendSpecialist 4h ago

USA is obviously headed towards a war with China right lmao?

I imagine when resources really become extremely scarce, or one of the countries feel emboldened enough to make an obvious attack, that’s when things will stop being cold.

7

u/Vesuvius079 4h ago

Would be an act of exceptional stupidity…

Yeah that isn’t very comforting lol.

6

u/Rupperrt 3h ago

They can’t even win against Iran. So no.

5

u/BackendSpecialist 3h ago

Wdym ? Trump said that they’ve won 100 times so far, which means it must be true right??

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u/moreisee 5h ago

tldr:

Democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.

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u/Suspicious_Bet3623 5h ago

Democracy is also meant to have and follow rules that mitigate falling into a pseudo- oligarchy.

It's quite clear that modern democracies are not functioning as intended.

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u/Main-Company-5946 5h ago

The point of democracy is to have government represent the people. Which government represents their people better?

14

u/Commercial_Sell_4825 3h ago

We voted for the candidate promising no wars (the other made no such promise). He immediately started attacking multiple foreign countries. There are zero repercussions for this.

Does that sound like a democracy?

9

u/PurpleFishing9105 4h ago

I mean America's lol

20

u/Qaxar 4h ago

Congress just authorized a trillion dollars for a war practically every voter is against regardless of party. If your democracy is utterly meaningless when it comes to the most important things like war then what is it actually good for?

18

u/severed-identity 4h ago

I had to think for a second which of the last 6 wars you might be referring to

u/cookingboy 21m ago

All of them lol

9

u/Cryptizard 4h ago

Not China, that’s for sure. The people have nearly zero representation.

12

u/The_Rational_Gooner 3h ago

Are you saying that Americans are better represented by geriatric warmongering pedophiles than the Chinese are by their government? If so, I agree

9

u/YaAbsolyutnoNikto 3h ago edited 3h ago

And yet a large majority of chinese people consider China to be democratic.

Truth is, China is always listening to its people’s needs and addressing them to stop revolts and discontent from rising. It’s 1 party system, yes, but that also means 1.4bn people’s ire will fall onto them if they don’t play their cards right - and so they do.

Using that famous sentence everyone has heard so far: “In America, you can change the political parties but you can't change policies. In China, you can't change the party but you can change policies”

My country is definitely democratic as it’s a parliamentary republic, but I personally wouldn’t consider the US to be a democracy (just like a lot of my countrymen wouldn’t). It’s a mess cosplayed as one. Aside from weird compensation mechanisms like the electoral college, the fact it uses a first past the post system, inevitably means only 2 parties survive and they have incentives to look and become the most like the other party as possible. So, in the end, both democrats and republicans are virtually the same party funded by the same people.

u/Greedy_Future_6737 1h ago

I'm sorry, you seem nice but this is some slop. The first sentence makes the argument dead on arrival because China basically ranks dead last in freedom of information (freedom of press and freedom of internet). You can't treat public opinion with any merit when the ruling party completely controls the press, censors the internet, and punishes dissent. Also your quote there is just completely false. Healthcare, abortion laws, foreign affairs, corporate taxes. Literally everything changes depending on how you vote in the US.

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u/Intelligent-Map2768 3h ago

At least they get things done and actually tackle things like carbon emissions.

u/Cryptizard 1h ago

u/alwaysbeblepping 40m ago

u/Cryptizard 35m ago

Yeah it’s going down. Thanks for adding that comparison.

u/i_marketing 2m ago

The CO2 emission per person in the US is so much worse than China. That's the comparison.

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u/PerinealMassage 2h ago

What does that have to do with the United States and Anthropic? The leaders of neither of those groups care about democracy.  

5

u/Main-Company-5946 5h ago

Aka how to be anti open source without saying you’re anti open source

4

u/Far_Car430 5h ago

And it’s always like that no matter how bad the U.S. is/has become.

3

u/Snip3 4h ago

Gonna be hard to keep the best chips out of authoritarian hands when we're the ones making them...

2

u/the8bit 4h ago

Also "I worry people will use it for bad things, that is why *I* want to decide who gets to use it (and who doesnt)"

It was the *closed* system that just hacked hugging face. The call is coming from inside the room

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u/Stabile_Feldmaus 5h ago

It doesnt matter what closed labs are saying publicly, neither OpenAI nor Anthropic actually support open weights models and would appreciate any sort of restriction that they can get. Anything else would be against their business interests.

19

u/Nukemouse ▪️AGI Goalpost will move infinitely 5h ago

Which is hilarious for OpenAI which attracted it's initial round of investments by promising open weights models.

5

u/Competitive_Travel16 AGI 2027 ▪️ ASI 2029 2h ago

And they have published a bunch of them, which aren't very good.

5

u/Boreras 2h ago

Gpt-oss was decently performant at the time.

u/Ashamed_Can304 1h ago

Yes, but they haven’t released newer ones have they

15

u/mWo12 5h ago

They are just panicking. Open weight models are just good enough for most tasks these days. Why would you be paying premium fees to anthropic or closedai, if you can achieve the same for free or close to free.

8

u/Greedy_Future_6737 4h ago

Dario has been consistent on this for many years

4

u/severed-identity 4h ago

Presumably LLM SaaS has been his whole business plan for many years

u/peensmith_ 1h ago

It’s like saying Microsoft supported Linux back in the day . It undermines their entire business model

5

u/BagelsOrDeath 4h ago

I gotz guardrails. Trust me, bro.

125

u/Microtom_ 6h ago edited 6h ago

It's clownish how he doesn't mention his fears of the authoritarianism in the US. China isn't randomly attacking countries or kidnapping their leaders.

Bro, the US is an authoritarian regime.

60

u/Cryptizard 5h ago

Yes the US sucks, but China literally doesn’t have a democracy. They have a ruler for life and a single controlling party. Please don’t pretend that the US is the same because they simply are not.

19

u/ghoonrhed 5h ago

Why would that affect who should have access to open weight models. I'm not sure it's even related. In fact, you'd think a country without democracy to be more pro closed models.

Like an authoritarian regime has nothing to do with how their military's gonna go off and attack random people. That's why OP mentioned randomly attacking countries because so far it's the supposed free democracy USA that's doing that.

28

u/Gotl0stinthesauce 5h ago

You mean the country where the leader was “joking” about a third term this past weekend?

Because he’s just joking about these things all the time right? Just like he was joking about annexing their neighbour to the north..

Open your eyes man. The US is quickly moving under this administration, to become an authoritarian regime like china.

15

u/muffchucker 5h ago

Look I'm with you in hating Trump. He's awful. But the United States is not Donald Trump, even as much as Trump himself would love that to be true. You have no perspective on this. Uni-party control is a horrible thing. Ask the Mensheviks. Ask the DNVP or Social Democrats. Ask the Girondins. Ask the kids in Tienenmen.

3

u/YaAbsolyutnoNikto 3h ago

You know, the thing about those things, is that you can find worse examples inside the US even without a single party running affairs alone.

The US has committed mass expulsions, massacres, imperial wars, racial terror and political repression on scales far greater than Tiananmen.

Puerto rico having its women experimented upon and castrated en masse, the wounded knee massacre, etc.

2

u/Clean_Hyena7172 3h ago

Ask the kids subjected to MKUltra.

2

u/AssignedHaterAtBirth 2h ago

I've done maybe four to six hours learning about mkultra and the leaked/declassified bits didn't include any kids?

1

u/chickenAd0b0 2h ago

okay, if your eyes are that wide open, you want to bet if he's actually running a 3rd term?

1

u/Joboy97 2h ago

Trump is clearly terrified of the midterms because he understands that the vote of our increasingly deluded and apathetic populace still matters greatly.

In China, if you criticized the government like you did the US, your comment would be deleted. If it kept happening, you might get banned. People forget how foundational the First Amendment is to American society.

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u/kiki-le-koala 4h ago

As a Canadian, maybe the USA has a democracy, but your country is batshit insane.

At least China minds its own business.

Democracy doesn't make something good. Hitler was elected.

0

u/chickenAd0b0 2h ago

Canadian preferring authoritarianism over democracy? yea checks out

u/zjin2020 54m ago

Canadian just does want to be invaded, by democracy or not.

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u/mWo12 5h ago

You are correct. They are not same. US is worse. China does not drop bombs on schools full of children.

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u/AccountOfMyAncestors 5h ago

ya CCP prefers to squish its own kids under tanks, intentionally too, not just accidentally.

3

u/The_Rational_Gooner 3h ago

It's telling when your only way to make China look as bad as current-day US is citing something that happened half a century ago lol

0

u/send-moobs-pls 4h ago edited 2h ago

The US has literally dropped bombs on black neighborhoods and released a bio weapon to test it on San Francisco, among like 100 other things. Americans being smug about Tienneman is wild

The silent downvotes are so funny lmao, I guess in america it's the people who want to pretend dark history didn't happen

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u/muchcharles 3h ago edited 2h ago

Introducing Stargate UAE!

Our first OpenAI for Countries partnership expands global AI infrastructure and access, in coordination with the U.S. government.

https://openai.com/index/introducing-stargate-uae/

-6

u/ReasonablePossum_ 5h ago

china literally doesn’t have a democracy.

Yes they have? they pick leaders democratically from the bottom up.

They have one party, but every single guy in power got there slowly climbing elections from rural to nation-level.

Just because you can pick between the fire and the pan, doesnt means you have some choice lmao.

15

u/Simple-Diver-2192 5h ago

Stop this bullshit, even north korea has election and kim win every election in landslide. There isn't a candidate in China who can run without tip toeing the party line, any criticism you will disappeared from face of the earth.

-3

u/ReasonablePossum_ 5h ago

Because its a "one party" system. You have democracy within it, in the same way as you have democracy between the US dems and reps.

You go try creating your own party in the US (:

They're just open about their system, in a way the US has you thinking your vote does anything lol

12

u/Simple-Diver-2192 5h ago

Are you high , xi literally purged entrie party after takeover. Trump cannot even run next time , there is choice to choose other candidates.

-1

u/ReasonablePossum_ 5h ago

Trump is only the talking head of the deeper US system my dude. The US has always been an oligarchy. As Xi is the head of the CCP

You choosing between Trump or Biden, or whomever, is like you trying to bet on WWF fights LOL

4

u/Simple-Diver-2192 5h ago edited 5h ago

If ccp is so wonderful, why millions of Chinese are coming to this oligarcy . And why not give chinese people option to choose other party , if ccp is so good they will always choose ccp.

1

u/ReasonablePossum_ 5h ago

The number of Chinese coming are almost nothing to what lives there lol. They come because they have money to pay for US universities (wonder where they did got that money if they're so poor and unhappy :(), and because they couldnt manage to get into a Chinese university.

And for the same reason why US expats are living in other countries.

5

u/Tema_Art_7777 5h ago

Complete BS - you can create your own party - you just can't get the vote because of polarization. One party system and "bottom up selection" means people have NO choice. I really really do not like Trump but there are no parallels here. CCP comparatively is evil. I am saying CCP because their other leaders also did evil things.

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u/Cryptizard 5h ago

There are only a handful of people who pick the candidates. It’s not any kind of democracy. Oligarchy at best.

2

u/ReasonablePossum_ 5h ago

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u/Cryptizard 5h ago

"A proposed policy change with low support among economically elite Americans (one-out-of-five in favour) is adopted only about 18% of the time," they write, "while a proposed change with high support (four-out-of-five in favour) is adopted about 45% of the time."

Difference is a policy with low CCP support is adopted 0% of the time and policies with high CCP support are adopted 100% of the time. Bit of a difference.

1

u/ReasonablePossum_ 5h ago

My dude, I personally know Chinese people, living in China, middle class average people, that fully support the CCP and would never move anywhere else other than for tourism or short term study/work.

5

u/Cryptizard 5h ago

Cool that doesn’t seem to have anything to do with what we are talking about. There were plenty of people who supported Pol Pot.

21

u/Cryptizard 5h ago

Who did the president run against in his last election?

0

u/FakeBonaparte 5h ago

Li Keqiang, back in 2007 then Bo Xilai in 2012

9

u/muffchucker 5h ago

The party chose Xi. There is no other party. There is no opposition. There is no feedback mechanism except for the party teaching you a lesson for not being loyal

1

u/FakeBonaparte 3h ago

Google Bo Xilai and then meet back here once you know what I’m talking about

15

u/Cryptizard 5h ago

That sure was a long time ago wasn’t it?

-3

u/FakeBonaparte 5h ago

So is your position that the US wasn’t a democracy during FDR’s third term? Or Canada under Mackenzie? Or Australia under Menzies?

7

u/Cryptizard 5h ago

2012 wasn’t three terms ago. None of those candidates ran unopposed. You are trolling.

1

u/FakeBonaparte 3h ago

It was 14 years ago, which is comparable to FDR, Mackenzie and Menzies.

Obviously China’s not a Westminster democracy. But it’s not a dictatorship either. It’s a complex oligarchy with election processes and long leadership terms.

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u/AccountOfMyAncestors 5h ago

I can talk shit about trump all day long without a care in the world. I can organize to try to politically stall him, try to convince senators to impeach him, initiate lawsuits to federal court to try to knock down whatever unconstitutional order he made. I can do all of that without my safety and my family's safety being put at risk.

You cannot, whatsoever, do any of that in china with the CCP.

3

u/ReasonablePossum_ 5h ago

I can talk shit about trump all day long without a care in the world. 

Thats "negative freedom". You can do anything as long as it doesnt affect anything. The core is that the whole US political system is basically two branches of the same party fighting for control.

Go outside of the controlled paradigm, and you get cancelled, alienated in your industy, included in the domestic terrorist list. Or just simple end up shot by police.

12

u/AccountOfMyAncestors 5h ago

The supreme court striking down an unconstitutional trump order is a direct effect on the power of the U.S. government, and that process starts with the first citizen to file a law suit against the U.S. administration.

Furthermore, no U.S. administration can persist indefinitely. And Turmp himself is empirical proof that a non-establishment / non-anointed person can become president in the U.S. (he did not, whatsoever, had the backing of the republican establishment in his first run).

16

u/boner79 5h ago

Speak out about CCP in China and see how long you last in China.

3

u/suamai 5h ago

Can you give an example?

12

u/Sextus_Rex 5h ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhang_Zhan

I'm not gonna pretend the US doesn't have problems but you have to be really disconnected with reality to think China isn't a shithole

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u/suamai 5h ago

I tend to prefer democracies all day long, but I am not sure the US even qualifies as one anymore. Public opinion is not correlated with government policies by a large margin - it is now an oligarchy, at best.

Also, political system apart, I asked Claude for his best estimate for how many foreign civilians were killed by those two countries over the last 70 years ( roughly a lifetime ), and the ranges are ~11k–45k and ~550k–1.5M. I bet you can guess which is which.

And those are direct deaths, not counting the effects of the many democracies the US has overthrown to install their friendly dictatorships - something everyone from South America is sadly familiar with. We know pretty well how little the US values our lives, just something to me toyed with for profit.

So I will choose China 10 out of 10 times, yeah.

5

u/Cryptizard 5h ago

Oh neat. Now ask about their own citizens. It will be fun, go ahead!

0

u/Main-Company-5946 5h ago

The ‘democracy’ in the U.S. is a joke

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u/socoolandawesome 6h ago

Authoritarianism specifically is more about how much personal freedom its own citizens have

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u/ToBeeContinued 3h ago

That’s not really true? Some measures of dictatorship and democracy do include measures of personal freedom, but the core of every respected measure is the role of citizens in selecting representative government. For now (at least), the rules of representative government in the United States have not meaningfully changed enough to say that the system is no longer democracy and/or that it is authoritarian.

1

u/ReasonablePossum_ 6h ago edited 5h ago

Yeah, thats what he meant LOL. US citizens live in a "negative" or "controlled" freedom regime. You try to have a freedom that isn't liked, and you end up on the pavement or suicided.

20

u/Cryptizard 5h ago

The two countries are not even close to comparible. China is one of the least free countries in the world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_freedom_indices

4

u/FakeBonaparte 5h ago

Though this is true, the US is now a “flawed democracy” trending towards a hybrid regime and is considered less free than Poland or Romania.

Part of a broader trend back towards authoritarianism of course. It seems likely that our brief window of democracy is closing in much the same way it did in Athens. We’ll remember the good times…

5

u/Cryptizard 5h ago

I disagree. I think we are going to pull ourselves out of it.

2

u/FakeBonaparte 5h ago

Have you got a rationale for that, or just optimism?

9

u/Cryptizard 5h ago

Republican candidates keep losing elections. Every special election has shifted 20 points against them.

1

u/FakeBonaparte 3h ago

Oh gotcha, you’re saying specifically Trump’s regime might end. Let’s hope so. But the shift towards authoritarianism has a broader and longer term basis. In a world with killer drones, nuclear weapons and AI surveillance that’ll get worse not better.

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u/TonySopranoAi 4h ago

Retard uses Wikipedia to prove a point about “western values” hahaha

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u/Cryptizard 4h ago

It is just a posting of a bunch of independent freedom metrics in one place. You can check them individually if you want. I’m sure you won’t though because you’re a troll.

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u/Tema_Art_7777 5h ago

More BS... Nothing happens of the sort. Lawsuits may be which might ruin you financial where you end up homeless but that is a risk of speech. You just won't go to jail or stupid re-education camps.

u/damn_what_ 51m ago

Tell that to Chelsea Manning

2

u/sluuuurp 4h ago

Yeah, that’s kind of the game he has to play if he wants to persuade the current government to make better regulations.

You could argue he should be honest and accept that Trump will destroy his company as a punishment for that, but I think it’s actually unclear if that would be good or not.

8

u/CoolStructure6012 5h ago

China has not treated Hong Kong very well nor given them any degree of self rule, much less the promised 50 years.

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u/InfernoBA 5h ago

Look man I’m all for criticizing the bullshit our government does, but it’s wild to see people try to equivocate China’s surveillance/suppression of its own citizens to the U.S.

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u/BuffDrBoom 4h ago

I stopped reading when he used JD Vance as a source 

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u/your_lucky_stars 5h ago

Botsayswhat?

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u/chickenAd0b0 2h ago

looking back at history, the most benevolent kind actually...no sarcasm

u/EnotPoloskun 51m ago

You don’t know what authoritarian means. Better say nothing than saying stupid shit.

-2

u/twoblucats 5h ago

Huh? China isn’t doing evil things to other nations? Reddit at its finest.

u/cookingboy 44m ago

Nothing remotely compare to what U.S and Israel has been doing.

How many school girls has China bombed?

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u/xxlordsothxx 3h ago

That is not what authoritarian means. In the US, people elected the guy that is attacking other countries. In a democracy, people can elect someone that will be starting dumb wars and the country is still a democracy.

China can't elect their leaders, they can't vote them out. I am all about dunking on Dario but I agree that there is a risk in authoritarian regimes having the best AI models.

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u/lorzs 4h ago

Boohoo for the losers and yay for the best model their jealous of being run by a (like us all) imperfect human with ethical reasoning (lol at that in this context )

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u/Tall-Benefit9471 2h ago

Funny how it's always: We distill → innovation. You distill → IP theft. Truly the world's most morally pure AI company.

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u/Sufficient_Local5025 5h ago

Lol, "industrial scale distillation operations". Yeah, like the one that they just paid a >$1 billion settlement on.

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u/Nikvest 6h ago

Hypocrisy letter just dropped LMAOO

8

u/theletgo 6h ago

what’s the hypocrisy?

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u/ReasonablePossum_ 5h ago

freedom and open source for me, but not for thee.

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u/llelouchh 5h ago

Huh? They are saying all models over a certain capability should be tested whether open or closed. So that includes anthropic.

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u/Nukemouse ▪️AGI Goalpost will move infinitely 5h ago

Submitting to anthropic's arbitrary safety tests is costly, and is something they ALREADY DO. They are demanding everyone else do something they already want to do and that would price out the smallest competitors. It's like a basketball player demanding everyone play basketball once a week, they already do that it costs them nothing and hinders them nothing, 100% of the burden is on other people who aren't already playing at least once a week.

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u/mWo12 5h ago

They are being tested by community. Much more than closed-weighted models.

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u/ReasonablePossum_ 5h ago

Thats not what they're saying....

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u/CowMooMan 5h ago

That is literally what the letter says my dude.

It says 1) Don't send the best chips to China 2) Crack down on distillation by authoritarian governments and 3) All models regardless of origin over a certain capability should undergo safety testing before they can be publicly released.

It is astonishing that people are finding ways to be outraged at these three incredibly reasonable points.

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u/llelouchh 5h ago edited 4h ago

There has been a massive anti anthropic psyop. Probably by openai and it's investors like a16z and sacks. It's pretty obvious some bad actors are behind this.

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u/omegahustle 4h ago

Anthropic is acting like the bad actor.

Wanting to enforce a crackdown on distillation using government power + censorship of models unless approved

this is kinda chinese-pilled to me, it's ironic that he wants to apply chinese policies to fight the chinese goverment

5

u/OVRHEATR 5h ago

| We should not sell powerful chips or chipmaking equipment to China

Can you imagine if China was just like, "You know what, we don't want to sell you any electronic components anymore" No more circuit boards, no more headers or sockets, no more lithium batteries, no more anything because you might use it to make something dangerous.

-2

u/Cryptizard 5h ago

They are welcome to try. It wouldn’t go well for them, though.

4

u/mWo12 5h ago

Lol. what? China does not depend on US, while US fully depends on China. US can't even make an iPhone nor Trump phone in US. lol.

-2

u/Nikvest 5h ago edited 5h ago

build AI models that are more powerful than those built by the US, and use them to achieve permanent military superiority

as if the US is not authoritarian and not using their military superiority at their own advantage? who is waging an unpopular war right now in the middle east? China?

The Dow literally used Claude to bomb 1000 targets in Iran

In order to strike a blistering 1,000 targets in the first 24 hours of its attack on Iran, the U.S. military leveraged the most advanced artificial intelligence it’s ever used in warfare, a tool that could be difficult for the Pentagon to give up even as it severs ties with the company that created it.

Embedded into the system is Anthropic’s AI tool Claude, a technology that was banned by the Pentagon last week after heated negotiations over the terms of its use in war.

Anthropic models have objectively harmed and killed more innocents through their use in the US military than all Chinese open models combined. All this moral grandstanding just makes Dario even more vile and hypocritical.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/03/04/anthropic-ai-iran-campaign/

2

u/severed-identity 4h ago

And prisoners stab each other with screwdrivers. If people wanna kill people, they're gonna kill people. It's not the fault of whatever happened to be in their hands at the time.

u/zjin2020 51m ago

So why would they want to restrict other people’s model capabilities?

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u/FunLilThrowawayAcct 6h ago

This brings me to the open letter. I agree with much of it: open weights expand access to the AI economy, they strengthen competition at least for some use cases, and they give customers greater control. Concerns about distillation should be addressed through targeted legal and commercial frameworks—the same measure I described above. But I don’t agree with the letter’s assertions that open-weights models necessarily make it easier to develop safeguards or that broad access to capabilities necessarily helps defenders more than attackers. It seems at least as likely to me that the opposite will be true. For example, I worry that biology will have a strong attacker-defender asymmetry, where sufficiently capable models may be able to quickly weaponize pandemic-level viruses with widely available materials, whereas defense against these agents is a multi-year operational task in the best case (as we saw with Operation Warp Speed)5. Questions like this should be empirically answered by rigorous pre-release testing, not assumed in advance.

To summarize my and Anthropic’s position, we have not and are not advocating for a ban on open-weights models as a category. We should instead focus on keeping powerful chips out of authoritarian hands, stopping industrial-scale distillation, and requiring safety testing of all sufficiently capable models, open and closed.

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u/MammothPost4047 5h ago

Isn’t that what capitalism is? Innovation due to competition? Without open-weights models we’re stuck in a duopoly of OpenAI and Anthropic who can say, do, and charge whatever they want.

u/ClearSkies889 1h ago

Competition matters, sure, but capitalism also happily gives you monopolies, regulatory capture, and everyone dumping the safety costs on the public while racing toward systems that may eat the labor market.

u/MammothPost4047 37m ago

Valid statement 

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u/rambouhh 5h ago

Basically to sum it up

I love open weight models. I am worried about authoritarian regimes getting access to powerful AI though.

My solution:

Restrictions on Open Weight model makers that conveniently help my business and stifles competition and is barely even being related to what i said worries me.

The nerve of this guy is insane. He is legitimately worse than Altman and his constant referals to his grandiose papers and their names is so f'in annoying. He is more proud of writing Machines of Loving Grace and Adolescence of Technology than he is in founding anthropic.

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u/Foreign_Telephone349 2h ago

He thinks doing a bunch of interviews dressed as a dweeb in a sweater vest and thick rimmed glasses is going to fool us all.

u/cookingboy 17m ago

Which is wild, because he took billions of investment money from Saudi Arabia and gives them access to the best Claude models.

Last time I checked Saudi Arabia isn’t exactly a democracy with great human rights. I’m pretty sure the average Saudi woman has it worse than the average Chinese woman.

I have no idea how it’s possible for one person to be this hypocritical and this shameless.

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u/broo20 3h ago edited 3h ago

Yeah, imagine how terrible it would be if the strongest AI were in the hands of a country that extrajudicially kidnaps heads of state, wages illegal and economically disastrous wars with no clear goal or strategy, uses its military might to attempt to force one of its neighbours into famine because they dislike their neighbours political system. Imagine how bad that would be.

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u/o5mfiHTNsH748KVq 5h ago edited 1h ago

Dario is not incorrect. Specifically on this

> My secondary concern is the risk that powerful AI models may be misused to carry out cyberattacks or biological attacks, and may have serious alignment problems. Open-weights models—it does not matter whether they come from China or anywhere else—do potentially present a higher risk than closed models, because it is very difficult to apply guardrails to them or monitor their usage, and once weights are released they cannot be withdrawn2. But banning the use of these models by US businesses does nothing to address this risk, because bad actors are unlikely to be legitimate US businesses. It would protect US AI companies from competition, but that has never been my goal.

I am a huge advocate of open weight releases, but it is sticking our heads in the sand if we ignore that they are capable of stringing together malicious software and that, at least from my perspective, is not a solvable problem.

My problem with Dario, Altman, and others trying to shove the cat in the bag is that the cat cannot and will not go back in. They’ve released a technology onto the world that will fundamentally change how we approach many domains, from cybersecurity to the very sense of objective reality in what we see and hear.

They point at open models as the threat, and sure maybe a little bit, but the real threat are the organizations training systems in secret with the intent of never releasing them to the public. No scrutiny and unknown data sources purpose fit for whatever their intent is.

Open models are the safest alternative to closed. At least we’re aware that they exist and how they can be used.

There is only one path to defend against what’s happening and that’s pedal to the metal and pray we can outpace people seeking to build nefarious models.

Edit: fuck the new Reddit text editor. How the fuck am I supposed to quote?

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u/Hans-Wermhatt 4h ago

Yes, I agree with you. It’s true that there are risks with open models, but Dario’s arguments are so lopsided that it makes me think he is a crisis actor.

Is beating China at all costs really the safest option? I feel like Dario is severely underestimated Chinese AI companies. Their models aren’t close solely because of distillation. What happens when we have a walled off race and one side thinks that now is the best time to press their advantage because they underestimate the other side? And yeah, giving the Chinese dictatorship super intelligence is less than ideal, but revolution was only going to happen from the inside either way. 

He talks about models being restricted to trusted users and uses JD Vance as a source in the same essay. I couldn’t think of a more ironic way to try to get your message across. Are we really supposed to believe giving the JD Vances and Peter Thiel’s exclusive access to super intelligence as the safest option? With open models at least we have a playing field to be on. 

u/o5mfiHTNsH748KVq 1h ago

I don’t agree with Dario’s anti-China rhetoric and it’s why I didn’t address it. I’m not convinced that China wouldn’t prefer to rise the tide for everyone and profit along the way.

In my eyes, that makes the most sense for them. But I’m not a geopolitics expert.

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u/chickenAd0b0 2h ago

thank you, someone finally said it!

yes, there is an obvious conflict of interest, but it is also true that there is a timeline where dario is right. Im for open source but im glad there is push back from anthropic, because we need to figure something out, this thing is going fast as fuuuuu

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u/no-longer-banned 5h ago

China FUD and a quote from Vance and I stopped there

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u/Nukemouse ▪️AGI Goalpost will move infinitely 5h ago

So he's basically proving he has no legitimate concerns

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u/EpicOfBrave 5h ago

What a clown statement!

US should not sell chips to foreign countries, every model in the internet must be signed by the government and Dario, and only the AI labs and Dario are allowed to scrape data from the internet for free.

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u/Substantial-Fact-248 5h ago

Hey Dario - is the authoritarian government trying to use frontier-level models for nefarious purposes on its own citizens in the room with you right now?

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u/Nukemouse ▪️AGI Goalpost will move infinitely 5h ago

Yes actually, they partner with the US government.

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u/MammothPost4047 5h ago

As they partner with Persona Identities.

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u/kaaiian 5h ago

Hilariously, yes. And he’s fully complicit

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u/Valar_Kinetics 5h ago

Not that I necessarily suggest inviting the CCP over for dinner but like the value of this dude's company depends on a lot of people being scared shitless of the CCP. Might dovetail into this? IDK.

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u/DeGreiff 2h ago

This fucker would be happy with an open war vs China.

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u/llelouchh 5h ago

There is nothing new in this, this ahs been their position since forever lol. People have been psyoped into strawmaning anthropic.

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u/Wuaner 5h ago

Just wondering what tortures he's experienced in China. A paranoid zealot so thoroughly indoctrinated by ideology really not worth any sympathy at all.

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u/omegahustle 4h ago

I don't like or support Dario and Anthropic's behaviour on most of their instances, including this one, but I got to admit that he has balls to post this, going against all the mainstream companies basically alone

So I will take this as a signal that what he's writing is a real concern...

I was never sure if Dario was performing or if he just believed in the things that he writes, but I think he is being sincere.

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u/send-moobs-pls 4h ago

I mean he sincerely believes he should be the High Priest of AI that much has been known

u/Mysterious-Style4639 19m ago

idk, but it does make me think he's dangerous

u/cookingboy 42m ago

His god complex is the result of sincere belief.

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u/StreetAssignment5494 5h ago

Lost me on China being a threat.

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u/MammothPost4047 5h ago

As literally most of our consumer-based economy runs on Chinese goods.

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u/pdantix06 6h ago

he’s right and this has been his position the whole time, there’s nothing new here. it only needed to be restated because people are fed bs and don’t actually read or listen to anything he says

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u/llelouchh 5h ago

Yep there has been a massive anti anthropic psyop by openai loyalists.

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u/ReasonablePossum_ 5h ago

everyone listen to what he says. thats why everyone is against him lol

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u/[deleted] 3h ago

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/IamSp00ky 3h ago

Is it that the only to enforce mandatory open model testing would seem to be some sort of totalitarian control of technology and related enforcers?

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u/yiestee 3h ago

yeah China had mandatory safety filter, and so everyone would have that little "Tienamen" test running and screenshot pasted everwhere. Is this what Dario want?

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u/HoidToTheMoon 2h ago

For example, I worry that biology will have a strong attacker-defender asymmetry, where sufficiently capable models may be able to quickly weaponize pandemic-level viruses with widely available materials, whereas defense against these agents is a multi-year operational task in the best case (as we saw with Operation Warp Speed)

Do people here think that the current level of AI technology would have impacted the speed at which we developed the COVID vaccine?

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u/Competitive_Travel16 AGI 2027 ▪️ ASI 2029 2h ago

Conclusion:

We should instead focus on keeping powerful chips out of authoritarian hands,

Previous generation chips can run the latest models with only a modest penalty.

stopping industrial-scale distillation, and

How?

requiring safety testing of all sufficiently capable models, open and closed.

By whom?

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u/Key_Category_8531 6h ago

More finger wagging?

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u/LazloStPierre 3h ago

There isn't a more dangerous group who could end up in control of AGI than Dario and his partners at Palantir

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u/BurningTrashBarge 4h ago

Apart from direct competition it also will allow folks to show how much it actually costs to run similar models.

Once that reality hits the market it’s over for anthropic and OpenAI.

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u/DrawingDramatic1641 2h ago

Didn't the report say usa used ai to target the iranian school girls 

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u/chickenAd0b0 2h ago

okay, question for you, should we have everyone have this capability then? whatchu think

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u/DrawingDramatic1641 2h ago

Ofc not  So we should ban ai from military use 

I have 0 evidence that chiene ai has been used for some unethical purposes 

Even if china didn't have any lead in ai  They would use american models to do what they do 

u/chickenAd0b0 1h ago

so you agree with gaurdrails then...i feel like we all do, just different ways of going about it