OpenAI and Anthropic unite against open-weight AI risks to their bottom line • Hacker News Board

Re: OpenAI and Anthropic unite against open-weight AI risks to their bottom line

#291

Post by ceuk » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 3:33 PM UTC

paxys wrote: post #166

nradov wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please explain how making it difficult to start a business and hire employees protects people. I've never understood that logic but maybe I'm missing something.

Go live a few months as an average middle class person in Western Europe and then do the same in the US. You can argue in favor of US superiority based on GDP and stock market and number of billionaires a hundred other similar metrics, but looking at basic happiness and quality of life there’s really no comparison. Europeans value maximizing family, community, physical and mental health, leisure time, hobbies, cultur…

I think about this a lot as someone living in the north of England (in a nice town and quite well off) maybe ignorance is bliss but I just don't know how life could get much better, but then I guess some Japanese person living a prosperous life in a nice community might feel the same about where they live (and might not rate the type of life I lead) so I guess it's subjective..

As I said I think idly about this a lot because when you feel like you've found a sort of eudaimonia you want to share it. But whilst personally, I feel like I won life's lottery being in the place and time I am, but that doesn't mean it's the one true way.

Wherever people are, I hope it's the right place for them personally

Re: OpenAI and Anthropic unite against open-weight AI risks to their bottom line

#292

Post by everforward » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 3:34 PM UTC

StevenWaterman wrote: post #98

andy99 wrote: post #66

I’m in a bubble so I may not see the big picture, but I feel like these guys are completely destroying any kind of credibility they had. Anthropic especially has this arrogant, “we’re smarter than you”, communication style, and acts like they’re serving some higher purpose (to the point of absurdity in some cases like “model welfare”) - I think part of all this might be the EA roots but I’m not sure. But then they ge…

> model welfare I shouldn't get in arguments about this stuff online, but have you actually sat down and thought about this in-depth? It's pretty normal to have a gut reaction that this is insane, but it's worth thinking about. If we replaced every neuron in your brain, one by one, with a silicon equivalent, would you stop being conscious? At what point? Would you be able to tell? If yes, what about if we took those…

I don’t even have to try to address whether models or conscious or not to point out the absurdity.

8.3% of US households had low food security at some point in 2024 (read: had to resort to less varied diets like rice and beans, or visit a food pantry).

5.4% had very low food security at some point in 2024 (at least one family member had to disrupt their eating patterns and skip meals or eat less due to food availability).

Those numbers don’t overlap, it’s 13.7% experienced some variety of food insecurity.

It’s worse in families with children, 18.4% experienced some form of food insecurity. Thankfully, even in most households with very low food security the adults bear the brunt and make sure the kids eat enough, but in 0.9% of households even the children have very low food security.

Talking about welfare for AI models is utterly insane while those numbers are above 0%. I do not give a single shit about model welfare when we have human children skipping meals. Frankly it’s the inverse and if Anthropic has money to piss away on this then we should increase their tax rate and feed some kids, fix some roads, do some good. They can go look at model welfare after they’ve chucked us into the post-scarcity universe they keep telling us is 2 model releases away.

Re: OpenAI and Anthropic unite against open-weight AI risks to their bottom line

#293

Post by AlexeyBrin » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 3:35 PM UTC

AlexandrB wrote: post #149

StevenWaterman wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> model welfare I shouldn't get in arguments about this stuff online, but have you actually sat down and thought about this in-depth? It's pretty normal to have a gut reaction that this is insane, but it's worth thinking about. If we replaced every neuron in your brain, one by one, with a silicon equivalent, would you stop being conscious? At what point? Would you be able to tell? If yes, what about if we took those…

> If we replaced every neuron in your brain, one by one, with a silicon equivalent, would you stop being conscious? At what point? Would you be able to tell? The idea that we could have a silicon equivalent at all is already a huge assumption. For starters, the silicon equivalent cannot grow or kill neural connections or neurons as needed. Biological systems have a number of properties that silicon systems just don't…

You can probably simulate (in theory) the creation and destruction of neural connections the same way we simulate "wires" between elements in an FPGA.

Re: OpenAI and Anthropic unite against open-weight AI risks to their bottom line

#294

Post by commoner » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 3:36 PM UTC

metadat wrote: post #262

Lutzb wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ARTHUR I'm sorry -- did you just say you need my brain? BENJY MOUSE Yes. To extract the question. ARTHUR You can't have my brain. I'm using it. FRANKY MOUSE Barely. BENJY MOUSE We can replace it if you think it's important. An electronic brain maybe. FRANKY MOUSE A simple one should suffice. Who would know the difference? ARTHUR I would! FRANKY MOUSE No, you wouldn't. We could program you not to.

Source? This is gold.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

- Script: https://archive.org/stream/hitchhikers-guide-to-the-galaxy/H...

- Film (with some differences): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41Vli6Fnj1E

Re: OpenAI and Anthropic unite against open-weight AI risks to their bottom line

#295

Post by AlexeyBrin » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 3:38 PM UTC

solenoid0937 wrote: post #170

StevenWaterman wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> model welfare I shouldn't get in arguments about this stuff online, but have you actually sat down and thought about this in-depth? It's pretty normal to have a gut reaction that this is insane, but it's worth thinking about. If we replaced every neuron in your brain, one by one, with a silicon equivalent, would you stop being conscious? At what point? Would you be able to tell? If yes, what about if we took those…

There's no point. HN is arrogant and thinks it understands the subject matter better than the people that have worked on it their whole lives. Everything is a conspiracy here.

There is no HN as a thinking entity, there are individual users each with his own mind.

Re: OpenAI and Anthropic unite against open-weight AI risks to their bottom line

#296

Post by classified » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 3:41 PM UTC

sourcecodeplz wrote: post #176

stego-tech wrote: post #34

And to think I got warned in another post that I need to be nicer/more professional in discussing this topic. Yeah. Nah. Bringing out the same drum I’ve been banging for years now , these companies have never actually cared about ensuring safe AI, regulation, or ensuring it benefits all humanity. It has always, always , been about control and their profit margins. Their actions have never reflected any sort of positi…

it is not just copyrighted works. openai and anthropic and google etc hire PHDs to create datasets by solving problems, writing thinking traces. then they train their models on those datasets. also as another user said, what is this 80+ years to protect some text? its ridiculous

It's only ridiculous for the big thieves, but if you violate copyright, you'll pay dearly. Calling it ridiculous will not protect you.

Re: OpenAI and Anthropic unite against open-weight AI risks to their bottom line

#297

Post by everforward » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 3:45 PM UTC

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #261

brazukadev wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

bad for the US economy but good for the World economy.

> bad for the US economy Almost certainly not in the long term. If AI is a productivity enhancer, which I think we have evidence for, then the American economy’s heft (and continuing dynamism) get a tailwind. The minority of the new, leveraged economy getting hit will be a short-term painful adjustment, but it need not be anything more.

The distills are almost certainly bad for the US economy.

AIs promise is undercutting knowledge work, which is our primary export. Manufacturing left ages ago.

In theory, if OpenAI/Anthropic win then the US still wins since they’re headquartered here.

If open or Chinese models succeed, it undercuts our knowledge work market and that money starts flowing out to inference providers instead of in to US companies and their employees.

Re: OpenAI and Anthropic unite against open-weight AI risks to their bottom line

#298

Post by Tenoke » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 3:46 PM UTC

rs_rs_rs_rs_rs wrote: post #137

Tenoke wrote: post #91

I am very pro open source models - I use them every single day.. But we obviously don't want everyone to have capabilities like and beyond what caused the huggingface incident in every domain , so it's not like it all comes from bottom line cynicism.

>ut we obviously don't want everyone to have capabilities like and beyond what caused the huggingface incident in every domain Why not? These tools are also very useful for defense, you just need to apply them. Read the HuggingFace postmortem, they had to use an open model because all others they tried refused to do any work.

Because sadly, as much as I wish it wasn't the case, offense is easier, more impactful than defense.

Re: OpenAI and Anthropic unite against open-weight AI risks to their bottom line

#299

Post by JumpCrisscross » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 3:48 PM UTC

everforward wrote: post #297

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> bad for the US economy Almost certainly not in the long term. If AI is a productivity enhancer, which I think we have evidence for, then the American economy’s heft (and continuing dynamism) get a tailwind. The minority of the new, leveraged economy getting hit will be a short-term painful adjustment, but it need not be anything more.

The distills are almost certainly bad for the US economy. AIs promise is undercutting knowledge work, which is our primary export. Manufacturing left ages ago. In theory, if OpenAI/Anthropic win then the US still wins since they’re headquartered here. If open or Chinese models succeed, it undercuts our knowledge work market and that money starts flowing out to inference providers instead of in to US companies and the…

> knowledge work, which is our primary export

We export more goods than services [1].

> Manufacturing left

America is the second-largest manufacturer in the world by a long shot.

> that money starts flowing out to inference providers

Where are most of these?

[1] https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/Press-Release/current_p...

Re: OpenAI and Anthropic unite against open-weight AI risks to their bottom line

#300

Post by ex1fm3ta » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 3:52 PM UTC

On today's episode of "AI Frontier Labs running scams": Now that the narrative of "too dangerous to be released" is not longer working since Chinese gave it all away, they have to come up with another one. You had the first glimpse this week: "Chinese frontier labs distilled our models ..." => so it should be illegal to use them in America since it's similar to illegal copy.