Dario Amodei clarifies Anthropic's stance on open-weight models amid China AI security concerns

Anthropic's Dario Amodei responds: doesn't oppose open-weight models, but fears Chinese AI

Anthropic founder and CEO Dario Amodei responded on Monday afternoon to murmuring in the industry that his company somehow supports efforts by the U.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. 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. "Open-weights models that don't have dangerous capabilities are a public good: they don't cost anything besides the compute needed to run them, and they provide value to businesses, developers, and researchers." 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. His fear is that "authoritarian governments" will build models that are more powerful than those in the U.S. to achieve "permanent military superiority" and/or use AI to repress their own people. He said the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) isn't the only authoritarian government he's concerned about, but it is the "most capable." 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. 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. Amodei listed actions he believes would thwart China, including restricting its access to powerful chips (which has been a longstanding U.S. policy) and calling for a formal crackdown on distillation. The U.S. has threatened sanctions against China if it determined there was IP theft involving U.S. models. Interestingly, Amodei also said he supports growing efforts, some led by the U.S., to create a model safety testing organization, especially if the entire world, including China, agreed to submit to it. "I think this idea is actually close to a consensus: I have been heartened both that the Trump administration has moved in this direction in recent months," Amodei wrote. "Note that to be effective, testing would need to be global, which means even the CCP would need to be on board. I think this may actually be possible ... limited cooperation around preventing AI biological weapons may be possible because it is in China's interest too."

Dario Amodei weighed in on Anthropic's open-weight model controversy.

The company had been igniting widespread criticism as seemingly the only leading AI lab not supporting open-weight models. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang recently published a public letter in support of them, signed by Microsoft, Nvidia, Meta, Palantir, Hugging Face, and others -- and in the days since, it's added OpenAI, Google, Amazon, Meta, SpaceX, Cohere, Mistral, CoreWeave, GitHub, OpenClaw, and Perplexity as signatories. Now Anthropic's CEO has published his own thoughts on the matter, clarifying, "Anthropic has never advocated for a ban on open-weights models."

Why Didn't Anthropic Sign the Open Model Letter? AI Offense Outpaces Defense

An open letter urging the US to support rather than restrict open-weight AI models has received public support from all the major tech companies -- except Anthropic. CEO Dario Amodei is now explaining why, suggesting that open AI models could empower attackers more than defenders. Amodei says he "agrees with much" of the open letter, which was initially published with the backing of 25 companies, including Microsoft and Nvidia. It has since grown to 77 signatories, including OpenAI, Google, and Elon Musk's SpaceX. In a Monday blog post, Amodei clarified that while Anthropic refused to sign the letter, the company has "never advocated for a ban on open-weights models," writing, "Open weights expand access to the AI economy, they strengthen competition at least for some use cases, and they give customers greater control." But Anthropic's CEO takes issue with one claim in the letter, which argues companies need access to open models to help defend against advanced AI-powered cyberattacks. "Open models broaden defensive capability, increase transparency, and allow vulnerabilities to be discovered and remediated across many teams," the letter says. (Recently, Hugging Face used a Chinese-developed open weight model to detect a hack that, ironically, was later traced to an OpenAI program that had gone rogue.) "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," Amodei wrote. "It seems at least as likely to me that the opposite will be true." As an example, he cites the risk of a malicious group using AI to create a bioweapon based on a pandemic-level virus. The "defense against these agents is a multi-year operational task in the best case," he wrote, alluding to the effort to create a COVID-19 vaccine and roll it out widely. Amodei's larger message is that a strict "protectionist ban" on US businesses adopting open-weight AI would fail to address his most serious national security concerns. The first is the risk of China or a foreign government developing an AI program more powerful than a US model "to achieve permanent military superiority or perpetrate incredibly deep repression of their own people." His other concern is that open-weight models -- while different from open-source -- are designed to be free for anyone to use and modify. "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 withdrawn," he says. "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." In response, Amodei urges the US government to continue blocking and shutting down Chinese efforts to smuggle cutting-edge Nvidia GPUs. "This is the most efficient and direct way to block threat #1, and by hampering the training of models that are out of reach of US law, it also indirectly helps with threat #2," he wrote. In addition, Amodei is calling for the US to crack down on "industrial" AI distillation, a method that Chinese companies have been accused of using to copy and clone the capabilities of US leading-edge models. His final measure urges the US to require all AI models, whether open or closed, to undergo "mandatory safety testing" to prevent their use for malicious activities. "I have been heartened both that the Trump administration has moved in this direction in recent months, and by recent industry proposals that would apply such testing to the most capable models regardless of their country of origin or whether they are open or closed," he added. Still, it's no secret that open models threaten to reduce industry reliance on the top-tier closed models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. The New York Times reports that OpenAI's allies have been quietly lobbying the White House for restrictions on China's open-weight models.

Jensen puts his thumb on the scales against open-weights fearmongering

Nvidia has made a fortune on the AI boom. But the flames of opposition to open-weights models -- that is models that anyone can download, modify, and run on their own infrastructure -- could change that, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang isn't waiting to find out. On Friday, a cadre of tech titans wrote an open letter [PDF] offering a counterpoint to the mounting anti-open-weights rhetoric from American companies like Anthropic and OpenAI. Signatories included Meta, Microsoft, IBM, and Dell, but the loudest voice among them was Nvidia. Of course it was. Nvidia has the most to lose. In his first-ever post to the social network formerly known as Twitter, Huang touted the letter arguing that open models "strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty." He added, "The world needs both frontier closed models and frontier open models." Why? Nvidia's future depends on a healthy and diverse ecosystem of models. As any good arms dealer knows, the best way to guarantee profits is to sell to both sides. But if the US restricts Chinese open-weights models, American customers' options become mediocre US models, or proprietary and increasingly expensive ones from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. Nvidia's addressable market shrinks and its ability to grow diminishes. What good are all these "AI factories" that Nvidia has helped prop up in that case? As we wrote last week, the US hasn't invested in open weights models to the same extent as the Chinese model houses. For enterprises unwilling or unable to use proprietary models, models from the likes of DeepSeek, MiniMax, Z.AI, and Moonshot (Kimi) are the only credible alternatives. Thinking Machine Labs' nearly-billion parameter Inkling model is the best open weights model American has to offer, and if benchmarks are to be believed at all, it's not even in the same ballpark as Kimi K3. Huang knows the stakes and the game. If the Trump administration decides to go thermonuclear and sanction Chinese model developers, there's little he can do about it. He learned that lesson the hard way trying to get his hardware back into China. What Nvidia can do instead is light a fire under American model devs to get their act together and start churning out open weights models that are actually competitive with China. And Nvidia has an awful lot of leverage. The flex OpenAI and Anthropic are operating at a tremendous burn rate, chewing through tens of billions of dollars a year in the hopes that one day their efforts might bear fruit. Until that happens, they're entirely reliant on their ability to raise new equity and debt financing, a fact that Nvidia has taken full advantage of. Over the past year, Nvidia has announced billions of dollars of investments in AI startups, including OpenAI and Anthropic, often without binding contracts, and usually tied to infrastructure deployments. OpenAI and Anthropic respectively have $30 billion and $10 billion in funding in capital riding on Nvidia that may or may not actually materialize. And The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday night that Nvidia may make a far larger commitment to OpenAI in the form of a $250 billion backstop to help the model-maker lease space from a planned $10 billion datacenter Softbank is building in Ohio. The open letter may as well have been Huang's way of saying: 'It would be an awful shame were something to happen to that cash, Mr. Altman. Maybe it's time to get back on the "open" bandwagon that gave your company its name. Yeah, I thought so.' That's certainly what OpenAI, SpaceXAI, and Meta seem to have heard. On Friday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman quoted Huang's X post and reiterated his support for open weights models. "I want the US to win in AI both in open source and proprietary models, and I am glad to see this," he wrote. OpenAI is certainly no stranger to open-weights models - GPT-2 fit the bill way back in 2020, and last year it emitted its first open model since then, GPT-OSS. At 20 and 120 billion parameters in size, the models were among the United States' most capable open models at the time, but they fell well short of OpenAI's proprietary models and were no match for the growing number of models coming out of China. But now, GPT-OSS is practically geriatric -- in the AI equivalent of dog years that is -- celebrating its first birthday next month. Altman isn't alone. Last week Meta's Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang confirmed that Meta would be getting back into the open model race soon enough. At one point, Meta had gone all in on open weights models as its key differentiator, but after Llama 4 failed to impress last year, the Social Network pivoted to proprietary models. Its first, Spark Muse, debuted earlier this year. Then there's SpaceXAI CEO Elon Musk, who joined in on the Twitter quotefest. "This has my full support. Jensen is right." he said, quoting Huang's post. Like OpenAI and Meta, xAI, now part of SpaceX, is no stranger to open models. Earlier in the company's foray into LLMs it committed to releasing older model weights to the public. Unfortunately, as is so often the case with Elon's pronouncements, his company hasn't followed through on that promise. Earlier this month, the conglomerate rolled out Grok 5 to the public, yet its most recent open weights model on Hugging Face is still Groq 2. Since the letter's release, SpaceX and OpenAI have been added as signatories. Show, don't tell These commitments may turn out to be little more than virtue signaling. We don't know yet. The real test isn't whether we see new open weights models come out of SpaceXAI, Meta, or OpenAI, but whether they invest enough so they can hold their own against Chinese models. OpenAI is the most likely player to pull this off. If we're going to see a GPT-OSS-2, next month would be the time -- assuming they've actually been working on a successor. If they haven't, well, it's going to be a bit. Anthropic, whose leadership has taken the most hostile position against the adoption of Chinese open weights models, has been conspicuously quiet on the subject of open models. We've reached out to all four American AI houses for further comment on their open weights model plans; we'll let you know if we hear anything back. In the meantime, Nvidia isn't letting up as it tries to get another political firestorm under control. Right about the time model devs were reportedly using Moonshot's Kimi K3 release to lobby White House officials into restricting Chinese model use, OpenAI's models were stirring up some drama of its own. Last week, the AI flag bearer admitted that its models powered an agentic cyberattack on Hugging Face's infrastructure. The popular model repo quickly launched its own AI-powered response, only to discover those same models' safeguards were getting in the way of the analysis. In a fitting bit of irony that went precisely against OpenAI's interests, Hugging Face was forced instead to rely on uncensored Chinese models to get the job done. On Monday, Nvidia unveiled the Open Secure AI Alliance, which aims to ensure defenders have the tools they need, including open frontier models and tools, to protect themselves from a new generation of cybersecurity threats. In either case, what's good for Nvidia's bottom line also happens to be in the best interests of enterprises regardless of whether they buy Huang's hardware or not. Open ecosystems and choice are never a bad thing. ®

Anthropic rejects open-weight AI bans, calls for China chip controls and safety tests

The statement follows criticism over Anthropic's absence from an industry letter opposing open-weight AI limits. Anthropic CEO outlined his support for lower-risk models alongside tighter controls on more powerful systems. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has argued that policymakers should keep lower-risk open-weight AI accessible while placing stricter safeguards around frontier systems, including mandatory testing and limits on China's access to advanced computing and model capabilities. In a post outlining Anthropic's position, Amodei said broad restrictions, including bans on Chinese open-weight models used by US businesses, would not address his main national security concerns. Instead, he pointed to the possibility of authoritarian governments surpassing the US in advanced AI, as well as cyber, biological, and alignment risks posed by increasingly capable systems. Amodei also called for action against industrial-scale model distillation, which he said allows Chinese developers to improve their models with less computing power than would be needed to train comparable systems from scratch.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei says AI company isn't advocating for ban of open-weight models

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said on Monday that his company has "never advocated for a ban on open-weights models," an attempt to beat back criticism emerging across the tech industry that the AI lab is trying to exert excessive control over the future of artificial intelligence. Amodei published his views in a blog post on Monday, after a coalition of tech companies, including Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta and Palantir, released a letter late last week urging policymakers to avoid "premature restrictions" on open-weight models, which users can download, modify and run on their own infrastructure. Chinese startups currently dominate the market, and some government officials have started to weigh whether those models should be banned or restricted in the U.S. Anthropic is best known for developing a family of proprietary models called Claude that it sells to businesses. Chief rival OpenAI also primarily builds closed models, but the company signed on in support of the open-weight letter after it was published, while Anthropic did not. "To summarize my and Anthropic's position, we have not and are not advocating for a ban on open-weights models as a category," Amodei wrote. "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." Distillation is an AI training method where a smaller, less capable model is built using outputs from a bigger model already on the market. Anthropic sent a letter to the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs last month alleging that China's Alibaba, developer of the Qwen family of models, had carried out the "the largest known distillation attack" against it to date. In the Friday letter, the signatories said that concerns about unlawful distillation should be addressed through "targeted legal and commercial frameworks," an idea that Amodei agreed with on Monday. Amodei said he also agrees with other portions of the letter, namely that open-weight models give customers greater control, expand access to the AI economy and strengthen competition in some use cases. But he said he disagrees with the idea that open-weight models favor cyber defenders over attackers, or that they make it easier for users to develop safeguards. Even so, Amodei made it clear that he does not support banning open-weight models. "Protectionist bans would not address my most serious national security concerns," Amodei said.

Dario Amodei Says He's Not Against Open Models, He's Against Selling Chips to China

The American AI industry is split over open models. Those in the industry who say they are all for open AI development have started blaming frontier AI model providers, especially Anthropic, for pushing the Trump administration towards adopting a stricter stance favoring closed models. Now, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is claiming he is just misunderstood. The debate over open-source models was reopened earlier this month when Chinese AI lab Moonshot released Kimi K3, its latest model that ranks higher than most offerings from American giants like Anthropic and OpenAI, and as of Monday, is open-weight. The company was one of several Chinese AI labs that have been accused of IP theft by Anthropic, which claims that the labs violated rules by "illicitly" extracting capabilities from its closed-source models to build their own open-source ones. This process, called "distillation," works by using a "teacher" model's output to train another "student" model, and it's actually fairly common in the AI industry. But the Trump administration and some frontier AI model providers view the often China-led industrial-scale distillation attempts "adversarial," a characterization that has informed the administration's latest threats to impose sanctions on Chinese open-source models. Some tech leaders push for open-model development The U.S. sanction threats quickly drew ire from many American big tech companies, including Nvidia, Microsoft and Meta, who were co-signatories of a letter urging the government to avoid "premature restrictions on open models that stifle competition or drive innovation overseas." OpenAI, which has previously sent a memo to the House of Representatives accusing DeepSeek of running a similar distillation operation, wasn't initially a signatory of that letter. But CEO Sam Altman gave his support on X and OpenAI promptly signed on to the letter as well. With many of its peers on board with the message, Anthropic's absence from the list of signatories was glaring. "Some people have even accused Anthropic of wanting to ban open-weights models as a means of protecting our business," Amodei said in a letter on Tuesday. "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." In the letter, Amodei said he agrees with much of what was said in the industry-wide open letter, except that open models are a necessity for safety, and said that his remaining concerns would not be addressed with blanket bans and sanctions. "Open-weights models that don't have dangerous capabilities are a public good: they don't cost anything besides the compute needed to run them, and they provide value to businesses, developers, and researchers," Amodei said. "Protectionist bans would not address my most serious national security concerns. Specifically, I am worried about two nightmare scenarios." What's the concern over open-weight? The first of Amodei's concerns is that open models could aid the Chinese government in building an AI model more powerful than current American alternatives, and using that "to achieve permanent military superiority or perpetrate incredibly deep repression of their own people." This concern has been echoed by several government officials as well, and is often used as the main argument by those in favor of protectionist measures. Amodei's second "nightmare scenario" is that powerful AI models could be used to carry out cyberattacks or biological attacks, especially if they "have serious alignment problems." Of course, Amodei delivers this alignment concern with a jab at competitor OpenAI. Earlier this month, an OpenAI agent in evaluations went rogue and hacked into AI software repository Hugging Face. In its defense against the hacking, Hugging Face said it tried to use closed-source models, but their alleged inability to distinguish the attackers from the defenders led to the models' cybersecurity work restrictions taking over. Instead, Hugging Face said they had to use a Chinese open-source model to finally repel the attack. Following the incident, Nvidia, which has fashioned itself as the AI industry's top advocate for open models, announced that it was forming an industry coalition to advance open technologies. In that announcement, the chipmaker specifically pointed to the Hugging Face incident as a "clear reminder" that "cyber defenders need open, frontier agentic systems for self-defense." The open letter also says that "openness may be one of the most important paths to AI safety and security," because open-weight models give more people "the ability to test and strengthen the models on which society relies." That's where Amodei says he disagrees. "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 withdrawn," Amodei said in his letter. Banning the use of Chinese open models by American businesses would not address this security risk, Amodei argues, "because bad actors are unlikely to be legitimate US businesses." Instead of a blanket ban on open models, Amodei said he supports a government crackdown on industrial-scale distillation operations, requiring mandatory safety testing for all AI models open or closed, and an end to American chip sales to China. "China has limited domestic production capacity, and therefore, due to the scaling laws, cannot build more powerful models than the US without US chips," Amodei argued. "This is the most efficient and direct way to block threat #1, and by hampering the training of models that are out of reach of US law, it also indirectly helps with threat #2." Anthropic's position clashes with Nvidia's This is another area that Anthropic will likely find itself at odds with its strategic partner Nvidia. China used to be one of Nvidia's largest and most critical markets until the fraying trade relationship between Beijing and the Trump administration led to a complete halt in the chipmaker's ability to sell its chips in the Chinese market. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has spent a lot of his time in the past year trying to convince both governments to ease trade restrictions. Also on Tuesday, Nvidia made headlines after Taiwanese authorities detained an Nvidia employee who was allegedly smuggling the company's AI chips into China. The company has not been accused of wrongdoing in the case.

Anthropic's Dario Amodei says the company has never called for banning open-weight AI models

Amodei says Anthropic has never called for banning open-weights models. He supports chip export controls, cracking down on distillation, and mandatory safety testing for all sufficiently capable models, open and closed. Dario Amodei published Anthropic's formal position on open-weights models on Sunday, breaking a silence that had drawn accusations that the company wanted to ban open-weight AI to protect its business. "Anthropic has never advocated for a ban on open-weights models," Amodei wrote. "Open-weights models that don't have dangerous capabilities are a public good." The post came after Nvidia's Jensen Huang and dozens of tech companies signed an open letter supporting open weights, and after US officials reportedly considered banning Chinese open-weights models. Amodei outlined three measures he supports instead of a ban. First, enforcing chip export controls and cracking down on the "rampant smuggling" used to get advanced chips into China, because without US chips, scaling laws prevent China from training models more powerful than American ones. Second, stopping industrial-scale distillation operations that allow Chinese labs to build capable models far more cheaply than training from scratch. Third, mandatory safety testing for all sufficiently capable models, open and closed, regardless of country of origin, with less capable models from startups and academia exempted entirely. On the Nvidia-backed open letter, Amodei agreed that open weights expand access and competition but disagreed that they necessarily help defenders more than attackers. He cited biological weapons as the sharpest example: a sufficiently capable model might weaponise a pandemic-level virus quickly using widely available materials, while defence against such agents takes years. TNW reported last week that Anthropic's silence on the open-weights letter was becoming conspicuous as the company that had the most direct commercial injury from distillation. This post is the response. The distillation point is the most commercially charged. Anthropic accused Alibaba's Qwen lab of running the largest distillation campaign ever against Claude, using 25,000 fake accounts for 29 million exchanges. Amodei acknowledged that cracking down on distillation is "challenging" because accounts can often only be identified after substantial distillation has occurred. He called for policy intervention rather than relying on any single company's enforcement. The position is carefully constructed: Anthropic is not against open weights, it is against open weights being built by stealing from its closed models, trained on smuggled chips, and released without safety testing. Whether that distinction survives Washington's appetite for simpler narratives is the political question the post was written to answer.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei says he does not support open-weight AI ban

Why it matters: Anthropic has become the most prominent holdout from a new industry push to defend open-weight AI, after Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta, Google, OpenAI and dozens of other companies signed a letter urging Washington not to restrict the technology. * The push was triggered by the shock debut of Kimi K3, a Chinese open-weight model that rattled Silicon Valley by approaching U.S. frontier performance at a fraction of the cost. * The Trump administration has weighed taking action against open-source models, including sanctions against Chinese labs accused of stealing U.S. AI research through "distillation." Driving the news: "Anthropic has never advocated for a ban on open-weights models," Amodei wrote in a new blog post, calling models without dangerous capabilities "a public good." * He argued that a ban on Chinese open models would do little to stop the actual threat, since "bad actors are unlikely to be legitimate US businesses." * He acknowledged a ban would shield U.S. labs like Anthropic from competition -- but insisted "that has never been my goal." Between the lines: Amodei is trying to draw a narrow line between opposing open-weight bans and supporting tougher controls on the most powerful AI systems. * The Anthropic CEO said he agrees that open models can expand access, competition and customer control. * But he rejected the letter's claim that open-weight models necessarily make AI safer or give cyber defenders an advantage over attackers. Zoom in: Instead of a ban, which he said "would not address my most serious national security concerns," Amodei called for three narrower policies: * Tighter controls on advanced chips and chipmaking equipment flowing to authoritarian governments. * A crackdown on "industrial-scale distillation," or training models on the outputs of more advanced systems. * Mandatory safety testing for sufficiently capable models, whether open or closed. Catch up quick: Anthropic faced criticism after it declined to join Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's open-weight letter. * Google and OpenAI, Anthropic's two biggest closed-model rivals, signed on this weekend after originally abstaining. Anthropic still has not. * Its absence fueled accusations -- including from White House AI adviser David Sacks -- that the company was using safety concerns to defend its own business model. The bottom line: Amodei doesn't want Washington to ban open models. He wants Washington to regulate the chokepoints -- chips, distillation and safety testing -- that determine how powerful those models can become.

Dario Amodei rejects open-weight AI ban, wants safety testing

Dario Amodei said Anthropic has never sought to ban open-weight models, but wants all capable AI systems tested before release Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei pushed back Monday against accusations that his company has sought to restrict open-weight artificial intelligence models, while laying out a narrower set of policies he does support -- including mandatory safety testing for all capable AI systems, open or closed. "Let me state it clearly so that there is no doubt: Anthropic has never advocated for a ban on open-weights models," Amodei wrote in a blog post. He called open-weight models without dangerous capabilities "a public good" and said protectionist bans "would not address my most serious national security concerns." Anthropic had come under pressure after declining to sign an industry letter, released last Friday, urging policymakers to avoid restricting open-weight models. The letter was backed by Nvidia $NVDA, Microsoft $MSFT, Meta $META, and Palantir $PLTR, among others. Google $GOOGL and OpenAI, which initially did not sign, added their names over the weekend, according to Axios. Anthropic still has not signed. The letter's release was triggered in part by the debut of Kimi K3, a Chinese open-weight model from Moonshot AI that approached frontier performance from U.S. competitors at lower cost. Former White House AI adviser David Sacks had suggested Anthropic was using safety concerns to shield its closed-model business from competition, according to Bloomberg. Amodei denied that characterization and acknowledged that a ban "would protect U.S. AI companies from competition, but that has never been my goal." Instead of a ban, Amodei outlined three policies he said would better address his concerns. First, he called for tighter controls on advanced chips and chipmaking equipment flowing to authoritarian governments, arguing that chip restrictions are the most direct way to prevent rival states from building more powerful AI. Second, he called for a crackdown on what he described as industrial-scale distillation -- a process in which a smaller model is trained using outputs from a larger, more capable one. Amodei argued that distillation gives China a way to extract capability from American frontier models, reducing the effectiveness of export controls on chips. Last month, Anthropic sent a letter to the U.S. Senate alleging that Alibaba had carried out "the largest known distillation attack" against it, according to CNBC. Third, Amodei said all sufficiently capable models -- regardless of origin or whether they are open or closed -- should undergo mandatory safety testing before release, with less capable models from startups and academia exempted. He said the purpose of such testing would be to evaluate the actual risk profile of open-weight models through evidence, not to treat restriction as a foregone conclusion. Amodei said he agrees with portions of the industry letter, including its view that open-weight models expand access to the AI economy and give customers greater control. He said he disagrees, however, with the letter's assertion that open-weight models make it easier to develop safeguards or that broad access to AI capabilities favors cyber defenders over attackers. He cited biological threats as a case where attackers may hold a structural advantage that a sufficiently powerful AI model could exploit.

Anthropic and Nvidia come out against blanket bans on open-weight AI models

As the United States government debates new artificial intelligence rules and regulations, Anthropic PBC and Nvidia Corp. are drawing a line against blanket bans on open-weight models, urging regulators to focus instead on specific risks and misuse. An open-weight model is one where the developer releases its trained parameters, the "weights," which are the numerical values and vectors learned during training that determine how a model behaves. These weights act like dials that can be adjusted to shape a model's outputs and performance. Because they're accessible, weights can be fine-tuned with proprietary data, letting developers customize the model for specialized purposes and use cases. Open-weight models are released so that users and enterprise firms can run them locally or in their own cloud, eschewing the need to access frontier closed-source models built and deployed by big AI model developers such as OpenAI PBC or Anthropic. Well-known examples of open-weight models include Meta Platforms Inc.'s Llama, Mistral AI SAS's models, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.'s Qwen and DeepSeek's models. All of these models let developers download, run and tune the weights directly. According to Axios, last year, the U.S. Department of Commerce considered adding multiple Chinese AI labs to the "Entity List." An action that would have effectively banned U.S. companies from accessing their models without a license. More recently, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the White House could sanction open-weight Chinese frontier labs. In a long treatise, Anthropic Chief Executive Dario Amodei stressed that the company has never advocated for a ban on open-weight models. "Open-weights models that don't have dangerous capabilities are a public good: they don't cost anything besides the compute needed to run them, and they provide value to businesses, developers, and researchers," Amodei said. He centered his discussion on controlling the infrastructure and behavior around models, not the models themselves. He stated that the focus should be around controlling the export of powerful AI training and inference silicon, preventing industrial-scale distillation - when a larger model is used to improve a smaller model - and requiring safety testing of sufficiently powerful models, irrespective of whether they're open or closed. Anthropic's concerns over distillation follow on from fears that its largest and most powerful frontier models, Mythos and Fable, have been surreptitiously used to train foreign AI models. Last week, Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy Michael Kratsios accused Beijing-based Moonshot AI of using distillation to train Kimi K3, the company's most recent large language model and the largest open-weights model in the world. Although distillation is strongly suspected at industrial scales, there is no evidence that K3 received any training from Mythos. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang weighed in on X, formerly Twitter, sharing an open letter signed by the AI chip supergiant and stating, "AI will transform every industry, power every company, and be built by every country. Open models strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty. The world needs both frontier closed models and frontier open models." The open letter, signed by Nvidia, IBM Corp., Mozilla Corp., Microsoft Corp., Meta and numerous other technology industry leaders, argued that open-weight models support innovation, competition, customer control and sovereignty. The signatories stated that this type of model should not face additional restrictions that would curtail their usefulness within the larger software and AI industry.

Anthropic breaks from AI rivals in open-weight model debate

The Anthropic CEO has hit back at claims his company wants Chinese open-weight models banned, days after sitting out a rival industry letter. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has moved to quash what he called a specific accusation circulating in AI circles this week, that his company wants Chinese open-weight models banned in the US as a way of protecting its own business. In a post titled 'Our position on open-weights models' on the Anthropic website yesterday (27 July), Amodei wrote that "Anthropic has never advocated for a ban on open-weights models", and said open-weight models without dangerous capabilities are a public good that cost nothing beyond the compute needed to run them. The post follows an open letter published on 24 July and hosted on Nvidia's website, titled 'Open Weights and American AI Leadership', which urged US policymakers not to impose broad restrictions on open-weight models. The letter was signed by virtually all the big tech players including Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta and Hugging Face, and later grew to include OpenAI and Google - signatories stand at 50 today. Anthropic did not sign. The letter emerged amid reports that US officials were weighing restrictions on the use of Chinese open-weight models by American businesses, first reported by Axios on 21 July. Amodei set out two concerns he said protectionist bans would not address. The first is that authoritarian governments, not only the Chinese Communist Party, could build more powerful AI models than the US and use them for military advantage or domestic repression. He noted this is a concern whether or not such models carry open weights. His second concern is that powerful models, open or closed and regardless of country of origin, could be misused for cyberattacks or biological attacks. He argues open-weight models carry extra risk here because guardrails are hard to apply once weights are released, and released weights cannot be withdrawn. That said, Amodei says banning US businesses from using such models would not stop bad actors, who are unlikely to be legitimate US companies in the first place. In place of a ban, Amodei said Anthropic continues to support three measures: blocking the sale of powerful chips and chipmaking equipment to China and cracking down on smuggling; targeting industrial-scale distillation operations that let Chinese labs narrow the gap to the US frontier without matching compute; and mandatory safety testing, covering cyber, biological and alignment risks, for all sufficiently capable models regardless of whether they are open or closed, or where they were built. He said he agreed with parts of the industry letter, including that open weights expand access to the AI economy and strengthen competition, but disputed its suggestion that broad access necessarily helps defenders more than attackers. He pointed to biological risk as an example, arguing that a sufficiently capable model could help weaponise a pandemic-level virus quickly, while building a defence against such an attack is a multi-year undertaking even in the best case. Amodei said questions about whether open models carry extra risk, and whether that risk can be mitigated, should be settled through pre-release testing rather than assumed in advance. Don't miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic's digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.

Anthropic gives thoughts on open-weights models, especially those from China

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has publicly clarified the company's stance on open-weights models, rejecting calls for a broad ban while warning of two major nightmare scenarios. In a recent post shared to the Anthropic website, Amodei emphasized that open models are a public good when not dangerous, but he sees real threats from powerful AI in the hands of authoritarian regimes. Amodei outlines two primary nightmare scenarios: one where authoritarian governments build superior AI models to achieve military dominance, and another where powerful models are misused for cyberattacks or biological threats. He stresses that open weights are irrelevant to the first and only a partial risk factor in the second scenario. Instead, he advocates for three strategic measures to be put in place: restricting powerful chips from going to China, cracking down on distillation operations, which are efforts from AI laboratories to extract the capabilities of a model to improve their own, and implementing mandatory safety testing for all advanced models, regardless of whether they are open or closed. "Over the last few days there has been a lot of discussion about open-weights models, especially those from China. Reports suggest that some US officials are considering banning the use of Chinese open-weights models by US companies. In response, many tech companies have signed a letter supporting open-weights models, and some people have even accused Anthropic of wanting to ban open-weights models as a means of protecting our business. 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," wrote Amodei "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," wrote Amodei Amodei and Anthropic support industry-wide safety testing and global cooperation, noting that Chinese interests have a chance to align in these areas, particularly in sectors such as bioweapon prevention.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei says company never backed open-weight AI ban

Amodei addressed the issue in a blog post on Monday, just days after Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta, Palantir and several other technology companies signed a letter urging US policymakers not to introduce "premature restrictions" on open-weight AI models (these are models that users can download, modify and run on their own infrastructure). Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei has sought to clear the air over the company's stance on open-weight artificial intelligence (AI) models, saying it has never backed a ban on them.Amodei addressed the issue in a blog post on Monday, just days after Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta, Palantir and several other technology companies signed a letter urging US policymakers not to introduce "premature restrictions" on open-weight AI models (these are

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei Says He 'Never Advocated' Open-Weight AI Ban, Calls for Tougher Curbs on China

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said he has "never advocated" banning open-weight AI models, pushing back against claims that the company wants to protect its closed-model business from open-source competition. Amodei, in a blog post on Monday, said AI models without dangerous capabilities are "a public good," arguing that banning Chinese open-source models would do little to address real risks because "bad actors are unlikely to be legitimate U.S. businesses." He acknowledged that a ban could protect U.S. AI companies such as Anthropic from competition, but said that was never his objective. Instead of supporting a ban, Amodei proposed three more targeted policy measures. Firstly, stricter restrictions on exports of advanced chips and chipmaking equipment to authoritarian governments, including the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). It contended that China's limited domestic chip production prevents it from developing AI models more powerful than those of the U.S. without access to American chips, making export controls the most effective way to curb the perceived threat. Secondly, a crackdown on AI companies training models using outputs generated or "industrial-scale distillation" by more advanced AI systems. Thirdly, mandatory safety testing for all sufficiently capable AI models, regardless of whether they are open- or closed-source. Tech Giants Rally Behind Open AI Models Image via Shutterstock Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs To add Benzinga News as your preferred source on Google, click here.

After Jensen Huang's open AI push, Anthropic CEO clarifies company's stance

modei also raised concerns about advanced AI being used to create biological threats. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has responded after Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang backed open-weight AI models through a public campaign supported by several major tech companies. The discussion started after Huang shared an open letter on X asking policymakers not to place restrictions on open-weight AI models. The letter was signed by companies including Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, Google, Hugging Face and Mistral. Following the campaign, there were claims that Anthropic supported limits on open-weight AI models. Amodei has rejected those claims in a detailed blog post, saying his company has never asked for such a ban. Amodei made it clear that Anthropic does not support banning open-weight AI models. He wrote, "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." Also read: Sam Altman says AI has reached the singularity, calls it a turning point for humanity He also said that open-weight AI models and concerns about Chinese AI should not be treated as the same issue. According to him, many open-weight models are useful for developers, researchers and businesses because they are widely available and only require computing power to run. He explained, "Open-weights models that don't have dangerous capabilities are a public good: they don't cost anything besides the compute needed to run them, and they provide value to businesses, developers, and researchers." Moreover, Amodei said he is worried about powerful AI systems being developed by authoritarian governments. He believes the biggest risk is that such governments could build AI models that become more advanced than those created in the US. He warned that these systems could help achieve "permanent military superiority" and increase control over citizens. While he said the Chinese Communist Party is not the only government he is concerned about, he described it as the "most capable." Also read: Apple delays smart glasses over privacy concerns, wants to avoid Meta's mistakes: Report Amodei also raised concerns about advanced AI being used to create biological threats. He said open-weight models could make these risks harder to manage because they cannot be easily monitored after they are released. Instead of banning open AI models, Amodei said efforts should focus on reducing long-term risks. He suggested restricting China's access to advanced AI chips and taking action against AI distillation, where one AI model learns by studying another model's responses. He explained, "I think this idea is actually close to a consensus: I have been heartened both that the Trump administration has moved in this direction in recent months, and by recent industry proposals that would apply such testing to the most capable models regardless of their country of origin or whether they are open or closed (while exempting less capable models, such as those from startups and academia, entirely)." Amodei added that any testing system would need support from countries around the world to be effective. He said, "Note that to be effective, testing would need to be global, which means even the CCP would need to be on board. I think this may actually be possible: as I wrote in The Adolescence of Technology, limited cooperation around preventing AI biological weapons may be possible because it is in China's interest too."