This is incoherent. The argument seems to be that releasing the weights would slow the frontier labs from raising money, which would give them less money, which would slow progress on AI. It assumed all labs in the entire world agree to self-destruct this way and no new labs every start up to continue the work.
No, really:
> As you know, funding for frontier model development depends on valuations that assume the weights remain proprietary. By changing that assumption, we can reduce the money available for future training runs and slow progress at every lab at once, without a regulator deciding anything.
Which doesn’t even follow. It depends on every lab in the world agreeing to self-destruct their valuations and stop competing. That’s a much more impossible ask than anything Dario is asking for.
It also ignores the possibility of new labs starting up, using the open weights, and continuing exactly where the old labs left off.
I feel like I just read the ramblings of someone who got so excited about the headline that they didn’t take the time to think if their argument was sound.
It is a bit incoherent, but it's also... provably compliant in a scorched-earth kinda way?
What are the alternatives?
A regulator saying no? Easy, your headquarters has just moved the Cayman Islands, Ireland, or Switzerland... the US office is just a subsidiary leasing the brand IP and doing marketing.
Or, you just ignore the regulator behind closed doors because you're part of some black budget. You wouldn't be able to talk about that closet back there even if it did exist.
Or, you don't do any of these complicated loopholes and you simply move all the training and inference to a different jurisdiction.
If the only winning move is not to play, how do you ensure everyone stops playing?
Simple: you must destroy the game.
It does have a kind of mad logic to it.
(That is a bit dramatic, but the idea is if we accept that AI research will happen wherever there is capital available, instead of restricting the research you restrict the return that capital can earn. And the only provable/market way of doing that is to require the results to be open. In other words, if the benefits of getting all that cash to buy GPU's gets handed out to everyone for free, then there will be far less cash floating around to buy GPUs, slowing down the process)
> This is incoherent. The argument seems to be that releasing the weights would slow the frontier labs from raising money
That argument is straight from Dean Ball on Twitter. Open-weight models are "decelerationist", which is bad if you're completely AGI-pilled but is actually great if you're either worried about AI Safety falling to an arms-race at the frontier (this is Dario's argument, and note that open weight models are far behind the proprietary frontier, especially since they target widespread lean deployment so they must skimp on total parameters and compute requirements) or Yann-LeCun-pilled (i.e. skeptical about AGI/ASI but optimistic about the practical usefulness of current AIs) like most people in China (including, reportedly, Chinese leadership).
That's sub-frontier activity - it has no bearing on the very real safety that would be gained by slowing down ("pacing") the proprietary frontier. The current cybersecurity scares are all about proprietary and internal models; open weight models are great for defense but get very modest scores on offensive evaluations (which makes sense if they weren't specifically post-trained for offense tasks).
It's a law, so nobody has to agree to anything. If want to sell access to a model, you have to open the weights.
It's Dario's plan that depends on every lab in the world agreeing.
Step #2 of his essay is "democratic coordination" among frontier labs and step three is coordination with China. I'm suggesting a single law Congress could pass that every US model company would have to follow on the same day, whether they like it or not.
Frontier progress is compute bound. Compute is bought with investor money. Investors put up tens of billions because they expect to sell the proprietary model that is created.
You're welcome to think the effect would be smaller than I do. But "it requires everyone to agree" is backwards.
> It's a law, so nobody has to agree to anything. If want to sell access to a model, you have to open the weights.
Laws don’t extend to the entire world. There are AI labs outside of the US that are not that far behind. Forcing US companies to open their weights would hand those labs another advantage, moving the frontier AI to a location outside of any US regulation.
Your proposal doesn’t make any sense.
> The plan that depends on every lab in the world agreeing is Dario's.
I don’t understand how you think creating a law in the US to destroy our AI companies and give an advantage to competitors we can’t regulate accomplishes anything in line with the AI safety debate.
Laws don't extend to the whole world, but markets do. The law should apply to anyone selling model access to Americans, the same way GDPR applies to US companies selling to Europeans.
Frontier development won't simply move offshore because the GPUs, most of the people, and almost all of the funding is here.
Our European and Asian allies would probably go along with this idea, because it costs us far more than it costs them.
Nobody gets taken out. Anthropic and OpenAI can keep selling inference, products, and agents. Every company will have more access than it has today, since it can run the weights itself or through third-parties. Many of them would keep paying OpenAI and Anthropic, at reduced pricing/margins.
It would only slow down the development of new models. But we've already got models with massive "capability overhang" that we could keep pushing for years.
* Destroy the free internet in the US, ban VPNs in the US, assume enforcement of this is effective, ban frontier AI development in the US (probably needs at least one constitutional amendment)
* Assume no other countries will continue to develop AI and approach or push the frontier
* Then, the frontier ceases to move until the US companies agree to let it move again
...
I don't think anyone proposing a "pause" has studied politics or game theory even at a high school level.
We can start with a US law. It would cover AI model companies with almost all the money and the GPUs, which is most of the frontier. We can also probably convince our allies, which combined represents most of the world market.
Also, if the concern here is safety, open models completely derail that.
Even if your someone who thinks open models are good for safety overall, a private model exposed only by an API point at least gives somebody control. How we should use that control is debatable, but at least it's there. Once you release that control by making a model open, you can't take it back.
If we think AI safety doesn't require closed weights, we should collectively decide on that and then move forward from there. But it shouldn't be something decided by default, by a few people from a few companies. We all have to live with the consequences of a choice like that, and since it is irreversible, we shouldn't decide it without consensus first.
"If you mean it, let a committee investigate" seems more appropriate to me.
I mean I get that they don’t want to share details on how AI might destroy humanity but this secrecy also leads to speculation that this is just a PR campaign pushing for regulation, which might come handy.
You don’t need to tell the world what your super AI has given you to cause this panic but definitely you could share it with a group of experts who then inform the public in a report, couldn’t you?
If they believe open weight models are inherently unsafe but are forced to release weights, then if they really believe their own safety arguments, they would need to stop development.
It follows if the goal is to deflate the bubble without popping it, and if the reality under the hood supports the absurd investment. The companies themselves wouldn't do it, but they could be required to if they want to operate in the US.
> It follows if the goal is to deflate the bubble without popping it,
The conversation was about AI safety, monitoring, and regulations, not bubbles.
Forcing the weights to be opened to the world accomplishes the opposite of all of that. The argument is incoherent. Or this author doesn’t understand the topic at all?
> The companies themselves wouldn't do it, but they could be required to if they want to operate in the US.
What makes you think the companies outside of the US wouldn’t just thank the US companies for their open weights and then continue on without any of the regulations but all of the advantages?
> Forcing the weights to be opened to the world accomplishes the opposite of all of that. The argument is incoherent. Or this author doesn’t understand the topic at all?
Or maybe you understand less than you think?
Frontier progress is limited by compute, and compute is bought with investor money. Investors fund labs at hundreds of billions because they expect exclusive ownership of the model weights.
If the weights are public the day a model ships, the valuations drop, the funding rounds shrink, and the next training run is smaller or later. Make sense?
No, it rests on the idea that almost all of the money, most of the people, and the GPUs are here.
Any country would be able to take the open weights and keep going in private. But countries like China can already do that today, since the weights are almost certainly already in foreign hands due to espionage.
What they can't do is fund the next frontier run at today's pace without selling into the US market, and selling into the US market can require opening the weights.
The author put zero rational thought into this. If Anthropic is legally required to release the weights of any publicly accessible model, their logical response will just be to stop offering public models. Anthropic gets most of its revenue from enterprise agreements anyway. Providing public models or providing public access to their models is their secondary business. They can cut it off any time. Public access to their models (at subsidized rates) has caused so much indirect harm and financial cost to them that they're very well justified to stop providing access.
Anthropic has already shown they're very comfortable with holding models from the public. Mythos has been around for what, six months, and there's never been a public release. Only the select few blessed by Anthropic have access.
Forcing transparency on public models will just accelerate privatizing access to these models. You don't want to live in that world.
>The author put zero rational thought into this. If Anthropic is legally required to release the weights of any publicly accessible model, their logical response will just be to stop offering public models.
I mean... that's the entire point of their argument, yes.
>Anthropic gets most of its revenue from enterprise agreements anyway. Providing public models or providing public access to their models is their secondary business.
While mostly true, don’t discount people looking for work that offers them familiar tools. The cheap public pans are a way to train a labor force + create upward demand from people trained on those tools to influence big corporate purchase agreements. Remove that and your lucrative corporate business today starts to struggle in ~5 years, especially given how largely fungible the models and harnesses are.
Not sure if I missed something but not sure what justification he gave that Open Weights would improve safety.
The counter argument from Anthropic is easy. If we open weights we can't detact it after being published / the guard rails that run on top of the models would be lost. Also abliteration would be much easier to do when a model's been publically release.
I'm not a fan of Anthropic but the argument in the article seems stupid.
> Any AI model a company offers to the public has to be released as open weights.
The obvious outcome of this plan would be frontier models not being released at all to public It'd be an amazingly bad outcome. Models accessible to the public would stagnate (no capital, no access to frontier model tokens to distill from), while internal models would keep improving at their previous pace, use them in-house, and eventually eat the whole economy.
If Anthropic/OpenAI would've shown incredible results using these models then I'd be worried about this. Instead we get Codex and Claude Code, bloated and disappointing software. I'm sorry but "use them in-house, and eventually eat the whole economy." doesn't appear to be a real concern with these two companies.
Anyone involved in burning that much energy at the same time as a large part of the planet will cook soon due to energy expenditure is definitely not helping humanity. It’s marketing & empire building all the way down..
CEOs are motivated by money and power. They will say anything to get either. If they truly wanted to slow down research, they would spend lobby money on the candidates who could enact laws.
Instead, they are partnering with some of the most disliked companies (x, meta) to further their goals.
Releasing the weights for a 1T+ parameter model doesn't really help "the little guy" when it costs ~$50K per H200 and 8 of them aren't enough to run a single node.
Somehow this plan manages to lean into every single bad outcome
> The big companies can afford the compliance teams and lawyers to keep up, and each new requirement makes it harder for anyone else to catch them
It also takes a lot to do anything with a 1T+ parameter model. Arguably there is still an immense capital moat. So I'm not sure it would even have the effect the author intends.
This is a dumb argument. There are truly a few options, and I see at least two which are not discussed in the original post: banning the publishing of strong open weight models internationally, and nationalizing LLM companies.
I’m not saying I’m for these solution, I’m probably against, but if we are being serious why are we not discussing these options?
1) there would be no incentive to develop a new model (non-distilled) if it had to be released as open weights.
2) frontier models are way more dangerous if they are open. It’s opening Pandora’s box, there’s no going back once they are released if they are too dangerous.
I refuse to believe this is not some sort of marketing piece for author's company.
This is such a short-sighted take and author seems unaware of what damage can be done with powerful open weights models (intentional or not).
Jail-broken Fable level LLMs can mean constant hacking leading to public desertification of the web (best case). Now imagine state sponsored bio lab leaking strange viruses on yearly basis. We've seen enough evidence already, it is difficult for me to imagine an engineer living at the centre of the change is writing this piece.
It's a different question if you ask me if I trust a single company to police the technology. But with the current state of things, I unwillingly admit that no state entity can do a better job at the moment.
> Jail-broken Fable level LLMs can mean constant hacking leading to public desertification of the web (best case).
A jailbroken model that can hack a website can also easily fix the vulnerability that allowed it to hack it. There is a limited number of such vulnerabilities. Over time, all vulnerabilities that are discoverable by the model would be patched and status quo would be restored (until a more powerful model is released: rinse and repeat).
Hence, the best case. Yet, the damage is permanent. Your favourite trail walking app patching things after the attack does not undo your location getting leaked.
In your scenario, during the disruptive phase, I can imagine apps advertising 'we have Mythos backed security company defending our data'. Reminiscent of showing how much your gun is bigger than your neighbour or gangs on the street, it's truly distopian.
So much communism is being unleashed lately on the news. First amendment provides for freedom from coerced speech.
Also: releasing just the weights is like releasing some source code without makefiles or configuration scripts. Sounds half-baked.
PS. The real problem with concentration of mega-models is the same old problem of temporary monopolies in emergent markets (IBM in 80s, Microsoft in 90s, Google Search in 2000s). Let's not worry too much about other peoples' money and use the amazing tools we have to solve our problems today.
> You seem like a good and principled person, and you have a record of giving things up for what you believe.
i mean, 3 months ago i started to use AI for a project i'm working for around 6 years, full-time but calling a billionaire good and principled is a stretch and when you consider what made him rich, you sound like a 3 year-old kid trying persuade a mom or a dad to get lollipops when your are diabetic
LLMs it's already a economical treat for various fields/people, which not only funnels powers to the elite even more, it does through by violating copyright... everyone who uses this technology is dirt (that includes me and my little dreams of hopefully creating a company which employs minorities on the tech field) but the amount of greed from people who own these servers/GPUs is beyond this world - the world isn't GPLv3 licensed yet, an ethical society wouldn't find excuses to provide and sell LLMs to the masses
Completely delusional. Step #1 is asking them to give away their product for free and stop raising money. Might as well ask for them to pay their customers since we are just saying stupid shit.
An open letter to Dario: if you mean it, give me a billion dollars!
Every time you, or any AI company releases a new frontier model, you have to give me a billion dollars. No strings attached. This will solve the danger of AI. Somehow.
The same playbook had been used, for eg. by Microsoft trying to fight Linux adoption and growth decades ago.
This is the *exact* same playbook used to instill fear and scare people into regulating and setting up barriers to open weight and open source model adoption which these companies know put their amortization and margins at serious risk. The outcome of this game is well known and well understood by this point. This FUD, even if it succeeds, only slows down, not stop, open source adoption. Eventually, open source always wins because people want something that they can control and manage costs.
Unless OpenAI, Anthropic, etc., will forever subsidize tokens, where it would never make sense for people, even after discounting 3rd Party/managed vs local/airgapped/self-host AI for risk, self-hosted AI, this FUD battle will eventually be lost, like it always has been. It is surprising to make this statement in late 2026, when OpenAI, Anthropic have not even IPO'd yet, and there is discussion in the streets that they'll IPO at trillions of dollars, something that is historically unthinkable, but history indicates otherwise: that in a decade or so, OpenAI and Anthropic are going to be footnotes in history and LLMs are going to be commodity with tokens selling all the way from unthinkably commodity to then-frontier intelligence prices.
We will tell those generations fond stories of how computers with hungry NVIDIA GPUs that could run quality language models in 2026 cost a month or two worth of a dev's salary, while the then-current generation phones that fit into a pocket has way more compute capability, were already AI native and were cheap as chips.
"The meaning of ANTHROPIC is of or relating to human beings or the period of their existence on earth." Combine that with his end of humanity warning. The entire company is named after human extinction (a species he is not a part of). He is foreshadowing what he already knows to be true.
This is incoherent. The argument seems to be that releasing the weights would slow the frontier labs from raising money, which would give them less money, which would slow progress on AI. It assumed all labs in the entire world agree to self-destruct this way and no new labs every start up to continue the work.
No, really:
> As you know, funding for frontier model development depends on valuations that assume the weights remain proprietary. By changing that assumption, we can reduce the money available for future training runs and slow progress at every lab at once, without a regulator deciding anything.
Which doesn’t even follow. It depends on every lab in the world agreeing to self-destruct their valuations and stop competing. That’s a much more impossible ask than anything Dario is asking for.
It also ignores the possibility of new labs starting up, using the open weights, and continuing exactly where the old labs left off.
I feel like I just read the ramblings of someone who got so excited about the headline that they didn’t take the time to think if their argument was sound.
It is a bit incoherent, but it's also... provably compliant in a scorched-earth kinda way?
What are the alternatives?
A regulator saying no? Easy, your headquarters has just moved the Cayman Islands, Ireland, or Switzerland... the US office is just a subsidiary leasing the brand IP and doing marketing.
Or, you just ignore the regulator behind closed doors because you're part of some black budget. You wouldn't be able to talk about that closet back there even if it did exist.
Or, you don't do any of these complicated loopholes and you simply move all the training and inference to a different jurisdiction.
If the only winning move is not to play, how do you ensure everyone stops playing?
Simple: you must destroy the game.
It does have a kind of mad logic to it.
(That is a bit dramatic, but the idea is if we accept that AI research will happen wherever there is capital available, instead of restricting the research you restrict the return that capital can earn. And the only provable/market way of doing that is to require the results to be open. In other words, if the benefits of getting all that cash to buy GPU's gets handed out to everyone for free, then there will be far less cash floating around to buy GPUs, slowing down the process)
> This is incoherent. The argument seems to be that releasing the weights would slow the frontier labs from raising money
That argument is straight from Dean Ball on Twitter. Open-weight models are "decelerationist", which is bad if you're completely AGI-pilled but is actually great if you're either worried about AI Safety falling to an arms-race at the frontier (this is Dario's argument, and note that open weight models are far behind the proprietary frontier, especially since they target widespread lean deployment so they must skimp on total parameters and compute requirements) or Yann-LeCun-pilled (i.e. skeptical about AGI/ASI but optimistic about the practical usefulness of current AIs) like most people in China (including, reportedly, Chinese leadership).
> Open-weight models are "decelerationist"
Open weight models are accelerating AI adoption and make it easier for other labs to advance their own models.
There is nothing decelerationist about it.
This entire line of thinking can be dismissed by observing that labs releasing open weight models are advancing rapidly.
For other labs to advance their own models, but only up to the frontier, not really (much) past it.
Is the frontier's moat not mainly data and compute? How does making the frontier open weight affect that?
That's sub-frontier activity - it has no bearing on the very real safety that would be gained by slowing down ("pacing") the proprietary frontier. The current cybersecurity scares are all about proprietary and internal models; open weight models are great for defense but get very modest scores on offensive evaluations (which makes sense if they weren't specifically post-trained for offense tasks).
Those unregulated sub-frontier labs become the new frontier labs because they continue advancing.
They advance with the benefit of the open weight models that US companies were forced to release.
Author here.
It's a law, so nobody has to agree to anything. If want to sell access to a model, you have to open the weights.
It's Dario's plan that depends on every lab in the world agreeing.
Step #2 of his essay is "democratic coordination" among frontier labs and step three is coordination with China. I'm suggesting a single law Congress could pass that every US model company would have to follow on the same day, whether they like it or not.
Frontier progress is compute bound. Compute is bought with investor money. Investors put up tens of billions because they expect to sell the proprietary model that is created.
You're welcome to think the effect would be smaller than I do. But "it requires everyone to agree" is backwards.
> It's a law, so nobody has to agree to anything. If want to sell access to a model, you have to open the weights.
Laws don’t extend to the entire world. There are AI labs outside of the US that are not that far behind. Forcing US companies to open their weights would hand those labs another advantage, moving the frontier AI to a location outside of any US regulation.
Your proposal doesn’t make any sense.
> The plan that depends on every lab in the world agreeing is Dario's.
I don’t understand how you think creating a law in the US to destroy our AI companies and give an advantage to competitors we can’t regulate accomplishes anything in line with the AI safety debate.
Laws don't extend to the whole world, but markets do. The law should apply to anyone selling model access to Americans, the same way GDPR applies to US companies selling to Europeans.
Frontier development won't simply move offshore because the GPUs, most of the people, and almost all of the funding is here.
Our European and Asian allies would probably go along with this idea, because it costs us far more than it costs them.
> The law should apply to anyone selling model access to Americans
So the US AI labs get taken out, and US companies fall behind on access, too?
This is beyond unrealistic.
> Our European and Asian allies would probably go along with this idea
I could see European countries doing it.
Asian - absolutely no way that would happen.
Nobody gets taken out. Anthropic and OpenAI can keep selling inference, products, and agents. Every company will have more access than it has today, since it can run the weights itself or through third-parties. Many of them would keep paying OpenAI and Anthropic, at reduced pricing/margins.
It would only slow down the development of new models. But we've already got models with massive "capability overhang" that we could keep pushing for years.
How do you enforce this though? How do you prevent any citizen from using foreign services eg using a VPN?
Just asking for a friend (“shut up Netflix, I already asked”)
The argument seems to be:
* Destroy the free internet in the US, ban VPNs in the US, assume enforcement of this is effective, ban frontier AI development in the US (probably needs at least one constitutional amendment)
* Assume no other countries will continue to develop AI and approach or push the frontier
* Then, the frontier ceases to move until the US companies agree to let it move again
...
I don't think anyone proposing a "pause" has studied politics or game theory even at a high school level.
If you're proposing a law that would not be in Dario's best interest, why address the post to him?
I explained this in the post. He seems like a genuinely good person who might actually do something this great.
Dude this site is so funny at times.
Incredible.
Yes, why would you ever address someone with something that is not in their best interest. Especially people that have power.
I agree. We should never do that and let them just live in peace and do their thing.
Won’t the companies just change what they are selling from access to the model to “compute” and then not technically be breaking the law?
> It's a law, so nobody has to agree to anything.
Step 1, form a world government?
We can start with a US law. It would cover AI model companies with almost all the money and the GPUs, which is most of the frontier. We can also probably convince our allies, which combined represents most of the world market.
"Make your country the last to get nukes" is a bit of a hard sell.
Also, if the concern here is safety, open models completely derail that.
Even if your someone who thinks open models are good for safety overall, a private model exposed only by an API point at least gives somebody control. How we should use that control is debatable, but at least it's there. Once you release that control by making a model open, you can't take it back.
If we think AI safety doesn't require closed weights, we should collectively decide on that and then move forward from there. But it shouldn't be something decided by default, by a few people from a few companies. We all have to live with the consequences of a choice like that, and since it is irreversible, we shouldn't decide it without consensus first.
"If you mean it, let a committee investigate" seems more appropriate to me.
I mean I get that they don’t want to share details on how AI might destroy humanity but this secrecy also leads to speculation that this is just a PR campaign pushing for regulation, which might come handy.
You don’t need to tell the world what your super AI has given you to cause this panic but definitely you could share it with a group of experts who then inform the public in a report, couldn’t you?
> It depends on every lab in the world agreeing to self-destruct their valuations and stop competing.
The Chinese labs are already "self-destructing" voluntarily by releasing their weights. Or do they have an actual business model?
If they believe open weight models are inherently unsafe but are forced to release weights, then if they really believe their own safety arguments, they would need to stop development.
It follows if the goal is to deflate the bubble without popping it, and if the reality under the hood supports the absurd investment. The companies themselves wouldn't do it, but they could be required to if they want to operate in the US.
> It follows if the goal is to deflate the bubble without popping it,
The conversation was about AI safety, monitoring, and regulations, not bubbles.
Forcing the weights to be opened to the world accomplishes the opposite of all of that. The argument is incoherent. Or this author doesn’t understand the topic at all?
> The companies themselves wouldn't do it, but they could be required to if they want to operate in the US.
What makes you think the companies outside of the US wouldn’t just thank the US companies for their open weights and then continue on without any of the regulations but all of the advantages?
> Forcing the weights to be opened to the world accomplishes the opposite of all of that. The argument is incoherent. Or this author doesn’t understand the topic at all?
Or maybe you understand less than you think?
Frontier progress is limited by compute, and compute is bought with investor money. Investors fund labs at hundreds of billions because they expect exclusive ownership of the model weights.
If the weights are public the day a model ships, the valuations drop, the funding rounds shrink, and the next training run is smaller or later. Make sense?
Your whole argument seems to rest on the idea that the AI race is entirely contained within the United States, where we can regulate them.
And that no other country might just take the open weights and continue right on with the advancements in private?
No, it rests on the idea that almost all of the money, most of the people, and the GPUs are here.
Any country would be able to take the open weights and keep going in private. But countries like China can already do that today, since the weights are almost certainly already in foreign hands due to espionage.
What they can't do is fund the next frontier run at today's pace without selling into the US market, and selling into the US market can require opening the weights.
The author put zero rational thought into this. If Anthropic is legally required to release the weights of any publicly accessible model, their logical response will just be to stop offering public models. Anthropic gets most of its revenue from enterprise agreements anyway. Providing public models or providing public access to their models is their secondary business. They can cut it off any time. Public access to their models (at subsidized rates) has caused so much indirect harm and financial cost to them that they're very well justified to stop providing access.
Anthropic has already shown they're very comfortable with holding models from the public. Mythos has been around for what, six months, and there's never been a public release. Only the select few blessed by Anthropic have access.
Forcing transparency on public models will just accelerate privatizing access to these models. You don't want to live in that world.
> ...their logical response will just be to stop offering public models. Anthropic gets most of its revenue from enterprise agreements anyway.
Enterprises are part of the public in this context, so that's not a loophole which would exist.
>The author put zero rational thought into this. If Anthropic is legally required to release the weights of any publicly accessible model, their logical response will just be to stop offering public models.
I mean... that's the entire point of their argument, yes.
>Anthropic gets most of its revenue from enterprise agreements anyway. Providing public models or providing public access to their models is their secondary business.
Enterprise agreements are public access.
While mostly true, don’t discount people looking for work that offers them familiar tools. The cheap public pans are a way to train a labor force + create upward demand from people trained on those tools to influence big corporate purchase agreements. Remove that and your lucrative corporate business today starts to struggle in ~5 years, especially given how largely fungible the models and harnesses are.
Not sure if I missed something but not sure what justification he gave that Open Weights would improve safety.
The counter argument from Anthropic is easy. If we open weights we can't detact it after being published / the guard rails that run on top of the models would be lost. Also abliteration would be much easier to do when a model's been publically release.
I'm not a fan of Anthropic but the argument in the article seems stupid.
"If you're so worried about acceleration, why don't you accelerationmaxx?" — OP
> Any AI model a company offers to the public has to be released as open weights.
The obvious outcome of this plan would be frontier models not being released at all to public It'd be an amazingly bad outcome. Models accessible to the public would stagnate (no capital, no access to frontier model tokens to distill from), while internal models would keep improving at their previous pace, use them in-house, and eventually eat the whole economy.
If Anthropic/OpenAI would've shown incredible results using these models then I'd be worried about this. Instead we get Codex and Claude Code, bloated and disappointing software. I'm sorry but "use them in-house, and eventually eat the whole economy." doesn't appear to be a real concern with these two companies.
That's a legitimate possibility but it's also much slower, more risky, and harder to raise money for than what they're doing now.
I am very skeptical of those 3 faces of American AI labs: Dario, Sam and Elon
Are they trying to stop everyone else from catching up with them or have they hit some kind of roadblock to improve models even further?
But IMO, they're not trying to help humanity
Anyone involved in burning that much energy at the same time as a large part of the planet will cook soon due to energy expenditure is definitely not helping humanity. It’s marketing & empire building all the way down..
> soon
Always soon. But soon never seems to come. I'm sure we'll all be cooked any day now.
Not sure on which planet you're living, but we are being cooked already.
CEOs are motivated by money and power. They will say anything to get either. If they truly wanted to slow down research, they would spend lobby money on the candidates who could enact laws.
Instead, they are partnering with some of the most disliked companies (x, meta) to further their goals.
Anthropic supported Alex bores who was one of the most AI safety pilled politicians https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/24/big-tech-new...
Dario has been pretty clear and consistent that:
1. AI model safety is the most important thing.
2. open weights decreases model safety
So it seems unlikely that this suggestion would be well-received
It's blatant regulatory capture.
How about reading AGENTS.md...
https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/6235
If you think the technology you're developing is extremely dangerous, release it to the public
You are joking, right?
Releasing the weights for a 1T+ parameter model doesn't really help "the little guy" when it costs ~$50K per H200 and 8 of them aren't enough to run a single node.
Somehow this plan manages to lean into every single bad outcome
I think the main argument was "intentionally commit economic suicide to slow the development of dangerous AI."
(That being said, Chinese labs are releasing weights, so I'm not sure how the economics actually work.)
> The big companies can afford the compliance teams and lawyers to keep up, and each new requirement makes it harder for anyone else to catch them
It also takes a lot to do anything with a 1T+ parameter model. Arguably there is still an immense capital moat. So I'm not sure it would even have the effect the author intends.
This is a dumb argument. There are truly a few options, and I see at least two which are not discussed in the original post: banning the publishing of strong open weight models internationally, and nationalizing LLM companies.
I’m not saying I’m for these solution, I’m probably against, but if we are being serious why are we not discussing these options?
1) there would be no incentive to develop a new model (non-distilled) if it had to be released as open weights.
2) frontier models are way more dangerous if they are open. It’s opening Pandora’s box, there’s no going back once they are released if they are too dangerous.
I refuse to believe this is not some sort of marketing piece for author's company.
This is such a short-sighted take and author seems unaware of what damage can be done with powerful open weights models (intentional or not).
Jail-broken Fable level LLMs can mean constant hacking leading to public desertification of the web (best case). Now imagine state sponsored bio lab leaking strange viruses on yearly basis. We've seen enough evidence already, it is difficult for me to imagine an engineer living at the centre of the change is writing this piece.
It's a different question if you ask me if I trust a single company to police the technology. But with the current state of things, I unwillingly admit that no state entity can do a better job at the moment.
> Jail-broken Fable level LLMs can mean constant hacking leading to public desertification of the web (best case).
A jailbroken model that can hack a website can also easily fix the vulnerability that allowed it to hack it. There is a limited number of such vulnerabilities. Over time, all vulnerabilities that are discoverable by the model would be patched and status quo would be restored (until a more powerful model is released: rinse and repeat).
Hence, the best case. Yet, the damage is permanent. Your favourite trail walking app patching things after the attack does not undo your location getting leaked.
In your scenario, during the disruptive phase, I can imagine apps advertising 'we have Mythos backed security company defending our data'. Reminiscent of showing how much your gun is bigger than your neighbour or gangs on the street, it's truly distopian.
They are going for IPO, don't be naive
The concept is stupid and the rule as stated is stupid.
"Any AI model a company offers to the public has to be released as open weights."
OK great, that means no models released to the public, complete concentration of power.
if they do not release any model to the public: how would they make money then?
Their entire funding model depends on that they generate much revenue _soon_
> how would they make money then?
By acquiring companies and letting the now-internal employees use AI, easily outcompeting any company they didn't acquire
It's somewhat doubtful but even if they did, that'd be much slower progress, achieving the goal.
releasing the weights would be reckless and borderline malpractice
So much communism is being unleashed lately on the news. First amendment provides for freedom from coerced speech.
Also: releasing just the weights is like releasing some source code without makefiles or configuration scripts. Sounds half-baked.
PS. The real problem with concentration of mega-models is the same old problem of temporary monopolies in emergent markets (IBM in 80s, Microsoft in 90s, Google Search in 2000s). Let's not worry too much about other peoples' money and use the amazing tools we have to solve our problems today.
> You seem like a good and principled person, and you have a record of giving things up for what you believe.
i mean, 3 months ago i started to use AI for a project i'm working for around 6 years, full-time but calling a billionaire good and principled is a stretch and when you consider what made him rich, you sound like a 3 year-old kid trying persuade a mom or a dad to get lollipops when your are diabetic
LLMs it's already a economical treat for various fields/people, which not only funnels powers to the elite even more, it does through by violating copyright... everyone who uses this technology is dirt (that includes me and my little dreams of hopefully creating a company which employs minorities on the tech field) but the amount of greed from people who own these servers/GPUs is beyond this world - the world isn't GPLv3 licensed yet, an ethical society wouldn't find excuses to provide and sell LLMs to the masses
Completely delusional. Step #1 is asking them to give away their product for free and stop raising money. Might as well ask for them to pay their customers since we are just saying stupid shit.
Anthropic will never open the weights, just like how no frontier lab will open up their training data.
Can we all play this game?
An open letter to Dario: if you mean it, give me a billion dollars!
Every time you, or any AI company releases a new frontier model, you have to give me a billion dollars. No strings attached. This will solve the danger of AI. Somehow.
What a dumb ask
FUD is nothing new in our industry.
The same playbook had been used, for eg. by Microsoft trying to fight Linux adoption and growth decades ago.
This is the *exact* same playbook used to instill fear and scare people into regulating and setting up barriers to open weight and open source model adoption which these companies know put their amortization and margins at serious risk. The outcome of this game is well known and well understood by this point. This FUD, even if it succeeds, only slows down, not stop, open source adoption. Eventually, open source always wins because people want something that they can control and manage costs.
Unless OpenAI, Anthropic, etc., will forever subsidize tokens, where it would never make sense for people, even after discounting 3rd Party/managed vs local/airgapped/self-host AI for risk, self-hosted AI, this FUD battle will eventually be lost, like it always has been. It is surprising to make this statement in late 2026, when OpenAI, Anthropic have not even IPO'd yet, and there is discussion in the streets that they'll IPO at trillions of dollars, something that is historically unthinkable, but history indicates otherwise: that in a decade or so, OpenAI and Anthropic are going to be footnotes in history and LLMs are going to be commodity with tokens selling all the way from unthinkably commodity to then-frontier intelligence prices.
We will tell those generations fond stories of how computers with hungry NVIDIA GPUs that could run quality language models in 2026 cost a month or two worth of a dev's salary, while the then-current generation phones that fit into a pocket has way more compute capability, were already AI native and were cheap as chips.
I feel at this stage it has become a west vs east race of domination. I don’t see them slowing down in the foreseeable future.
"The meaning of ANTHROPIC is of or relating to human beings or the period of their existence on earth." Combine that with his end of humanity warning. The entire company is named after human extinction (a species he is not a part of). He is foreshadowing what he already knows to be true.