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- Hacker News
- The author is trying to make the point that there are courses of action available to Dario that would achieve his stated goals but would result in Anthropic having very little impact, control or influence. And that because he’s not doing those things, his motivations extend beyond the stated goals.
It’s a good point and not exactly made subtly but seems completely lost on most comments here.
by itkovian_ - 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.
by sarjann - This made me do a triple take. Here is the proposed logic as I follow it:
> AI models are dangerous. They can help bad people do dangerous things. They may be capable of autonomously executing dangerous things. They may cause unwanted effects on the labour market.
> More capable AI models are more dangerous, but require more money to train.
> Money requires investors with expectations that the model will generate a profit over its operational lifetime.
> The operational lifetime value of a model is decreased if every model is public and can be hosted on any infrastructure.
> If investors see less operational lifetime value from model companies, model companies receive less capital and therefore train more capable models at a slower rate.
Follow-ons: There are immediate risks in releasing capable cyber models that can be ablated and then launch cyberattacks. Concentration of power moves immediately into the infrastructure layer for inference.
Models will be kept private for longer, if not indefinitely, given there is less incentive to release them publicly.
Enforcement globally will occur because accessing the lucrative US market means using an open source model.
The entire argument hinges on strict enforcement of this policy, when AI model routing can already be opaque.
It also hinges on investors being rational and expecting free cash flow from AI companies, rather than reaching a criticality threshold of model capability for recursive self-improvement internally and parlaying that into a global mega-corporation.
New labs and companies without infrastructure connections will no longer be able to raise money, given investor expectations, and therefore not be able to increment AI progress.
So a win for the infrastructure layer, models being kept private for longer, new labs being unable to compete, immediate risks in the rollout (I suppose could be mitigated by a staged rollout i.e. policy active in 2030, pricing effects now), enforcement being tricky, and in the event that foreign competitors lead the AI frontier and then start closing models, just conceding the market to them if US consumers and companies find workarounds to pay for foreign AI.
by aarondong - 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.
- State sponsored maybe but it looks to take at least 6Ti of VRAM to run which is quite costly...by nijave
- > 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).
by Marha01 - "If you're so worried about acceleration, why don't you accelerationmaxx?" — OPby astrostl
- 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
by bryan0 - It's blatant regulatory capture.by MarcelOlsz
- 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.
by ppeetteerr - 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...by ianm218
- How about reading AGENTS.md...by sschueller
- 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
by throwaw12 - 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..by olelele
- > 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.
by jsnell - 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.by quikoa
- 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.by jacobgold
- 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.
by tristanj - >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.
by bugufu8f83 - 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.by vlovich123
- > ...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.
by jacobgold - 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.
by Aurornis - "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?
by baxtr - 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.by ekelsen
- >the world agreeing to self-destruct their valuations
Did OpenAI releasing GPT-2 self destruct their billion dollar valuation or is it higher than ever today at $900B. The idea that releasing weights kills the future value that can come is not supported.
by charcircuit - > 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?
by andai - 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.
by manlymuppet - 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.
by jacobgold - > 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).
by zozbot234 - 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)
by floatrock