Live data from Hacker News

Our position on open-weights models

anthropic.com

91–100 of 1001 posts

Re: Our position on open-weights models

#91
post #54

> We should not sell powerful chips or chipmaking equipment to China This is so short-sighted given that the US needs China equipment for.. everything. They are part of the supply chain needed for building the machines that build these very chips.

Jensen was right. We should have sold chips to China so they'd be depenent on us.

Now they have their own chips and most of Nvidia product line is internally banned.

Re: Our position on open-weights models

#92

"No guys, Anthropic actually loves open weight models!" Yeah, and Microsoft famously loves Linux. Sure. http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/micros...

> 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.

No "love" of open weights asserted, just acknowledgement of value.

(And their call for safety was for both open and closed models.)

Re: Our position on open-weights models

#93
> My primary concern is the risk that authoritarian governments—not solely the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), although the CCP is clearly the most capable threat—build AI models that are more powerful than those built by the US,

Begging, ugly crying, spitting for that sweet-sweet regulatory capture. These nerds need to be bullied harder.

Re: Our position on open-weights models

#94
> Open-weights models that don’t have dangerous capabilities are a public good

Note the hedging against 'dangerous capabilities'. Undoubtedly, all the useful ones trigger this condition in Anthropic's eyes. The rest of the post is filled with similar weasel-wording. Make no mistake, this absolutely confirms that Anthropic is against open models in the sense that any reasonable person understands them.

The way the rest of the post unabashedly appeals to the current US administration's China hysteria is hilarious, and not at all subtle.

I guess we'll see about all the doomsaying here, won't we? Kimi K3 is frontier-level, and there's no stopping it now. As far as the world is concerned, anyway. If the US wants to kneecap itself that's another matter.

Re: Our position on open-weights models

#95

> Anthropic has never advocated for a ban on open-weights models. > All sufficiently capable models, open and closed, should go through mandatory safety testing. Yeah, this is anthropic advocating for a ban on open weight models. Who runs this test? What happens if this test is too costly or the administrator refuses to allow certain people to participate. This is exactly how the US has banned goods in the past, by r…

The entire safety evals industry is essentially funded and controlled by OpenAI/Anthropic. Notice that on recent models, they exclusively use internal testing or black box external vendors (e.g., Gray Swan) whose entire business is to serve OpenAI/Anthropic. And all these companies just share the same pool of researchers back and forth.

Re: Our position on open-weights models

#96
This reads almost dishonestly.

> Anthropic has never advocated for a ban on open-weights models.

This is not an unqualified never. The very next sentence makes a qualified statement: "Open-weights models that don’t have dangerous capabilities are a public good". That prompts the question, what about ones which do have "dangerous capabilities"? Are they not a public good? If not, then should they be banned? Who gets to decide on the definitions of these terms?

Re: Our position on open-weights models

#97
It's very hard to take his position seriously when he repeatedly refers to the Chinese Communist Party and specific Chinese ministries specifically, like some two bit China-watching cold warrior, instead of addressing China as a sovereign state actor. Imagine if any Chinese AI founder talked about the Democrats, the Republicans, about Trump or ICE etc. It's gauche.

Re: Our position on open-weights models

#99
post #85
post #38

[flagged]

> The NSA and the CIA with the same models, on the other hand, would use them exclusively for the good of the common man. has anyone ever made this absurd argument? the real argument is that CCP will leverage AI against US interests, which is obvious. it's weird how so many people pretend that they are citizens of the world and above it all.

US citizens have a much greater threat from their own government than a government an ocean away.

See, the Snowden Leaks.

Re: Our position on open-weights models

#100

So the argument is basically: This technology is too dangerous so only _we_ should have access to it. We’re the good guys and only we can ensure a safe use of this technology. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

> 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.

Demanding "required safety testing" is demanding a ban. Otherwise the testing would be inconsequential, right?

I'm sure he didn't mean just a "lobotomized to be worse than Anthropic products" badge for the test-passing models.

If a ban is the implied consequence of failing his "safety" tests, that means that Anthropic was and currently is advocating for a ban on some open-weight models.

Post reply on HN