Anthropic’s Dario Amodei responds: doesn’t oppose

What happened

S. government to ban open-weight Chinese models, or possibly open-weight models generally. “Anyone who has read my past writing should know that I don’t regard such bans as a useful measure, but let me state it clearly so that there is no doubt: Anthropic has never advocated for a ban on open-weights models,” he wrote, emphasis his own.

” Amodei also said he fears AI will enable “biological attacks” not just cybersecurity ones. And, in his view, open-weight models are more dangerous in those scenarios because it’s difficult to apply guardrails to them or monitor their usage.

Why it matters

His response came after Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang took to X (his first post on the platform) to share an open letter on Friday in which Nvidia and a long list of other AI companies including Hugging Face, Meta, Microsoft, Mistral, and Nvidia urged policymakers not to impose broad “premature restrictions” on open-weight AI models.

While that letter did not mention China specifically, the debate in the industry has centered on allegations that Chinese AI labs are growing in capability often by stealing intellectual property from their American counterparts. One method is distillation, where an AI bombards another model with prompts to learn how it works.

Amodei said in the blog post published Monday that he views open-weight models as falling into a different bucket than the threat China poses. ” Amodei said in his post that he has longstanding fears about AI, but businesses using open-weight models, even ones from China, are not among them. S. to achieve “permanent military superiority” and/or use AI to repress their own people.

What to watch

He also noted, citing a UK AI Security Institute report, that once open-weights are released they cannot be withdrawn This runs counter to what open source advocates argue: that access to powerful open models not controlled by a single entity helps defenders protect themselves. S. policy) and calling for a formal crackdown on distillation. S. S. models.

“Note that to be effective, testing would need to be global, which means even the CCP would need to be on board. ” When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.