The arguments against open source AI are bad

Safety is not restricting access to only people favored by the government. The greed of AI executives opened pandora's box. Now they are desperately trying to find ways to reap the benefits with none of the consequences.

Some people would say it is reaching some sort of singularity. Even if you don't buy into a more sci-fi interpretation of this, there are pretty grounded arguments one could make that there is some sort of "goal" in AI development that, if realized, would effectively make it a superweapon. Altman has been pretty vocal about his expectation that this will eventually happen and that it is his goal to be the guy to produce it. Even if it isn't some superintelligence, the ability for a machine to do something like, say, exploit cybersecurity weaknesses, is pretty worrying for entities like governments. It's the pretense used when we saw the US government ban a US model recently.

Again, you don't have to buy that "the singularity" is a real thing, but it's not hard to see that some people think some version of this is real and it is exactly what is being referred to as the goal in an "AI race."

What's quite odd is a prey species is manufacturing predators in some sort of reverse evolution, where we started out as symbiotic and are industriously pushing towards full parasites/predators, but I guess life finds a way.

> It's theoretically possible for a bad actor to embed hidden adversarial behavior in a model. But if this happens, it serves the interests of responsible actors to find these exploits as soon as possible, and the best way to do this is to let anyone who wants to inspect them.

This is a bad argument. It isn't trivial to tell if the weights have poisoned:

``` https://www.thedeepview.com/articles/microsoft-how-to-spot-a... https://futurism.com/future-society/easy-poison-open-weight-... https://semgrep.dev/blog/2026/ai-supply-chain-problem/ ```

I'm not arguing in favor of closed-AI; I'm simply saying poisoning may be subtle.

I was gonna say that at least the frontier labs may be motivated to not-poison their own models, but then Anthropic just attempted to poison Fable's LLM training capability so... sigh. I'll try not to derail.