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Our position on open-weights models

anthropic.com

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Re: Our position on open-weights models

#151

Post by tensor »

scilro wrote: post #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.

As someone who isn't American, I'm amused when someone from the US talks about the terrors of China or some other nation having more power than them as being bad for the world. The way the US is currently threatening to invade and damage all its allies, well, the world is already bad.

China hasn't threatened to annex my country yet, at least.

Re: Our position on open-weights models

#152

Post by NicuCalcea »

teravor wrote: post #85
pcstl wrote: 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.

The fact that much of the world is as unconcerned with the interests of the US as with those of China, if not less so, should give pause to Americans.

As a citizen of neither country, Chinese open models are in my interest more than US closed models. My only concerns is that if/when Chinese AI becomes more powerful, they too will have little incentive to make their best models open weights.

Re: Our position on open-weights models

#153

Post by bobjordan »

"In fact, the most dangerous model may be one that is trained in secret and handed only to the People’s Liberation Army for use in drones and the Ministry of State Security for surveillance and repression."

I'm so sick of all this anti-China shilling. There's zero chance that whomever is in power in the U.S. won't use AI in drones and in FBI/CIA/local Police/etc., for surveillance and repression right here in the good old U.S.A too. These government use cases for AI are both sides of the same coin.

China fear-mongering by business leaders only happens from businesses that have something to gain by it. Obviously, Anthropic fits the bill in this regard.

Re: Our position on open-weights models

#154

Post by idiotsecant »

MikePlacid wrote: post #111
pcstl wrote: post #38

[flagged]

I can understand why the Western media calls something that has an official name of CPC (the Communist Party of China) as CCP (Chinese Communist Party? Not sure here). What puzzles me is - why ordinary people always repeat this wrong abbreviation. Is it like “I never check the sources, I trust everything that Western media publishes”?

Up until a few years ago the PRC used CCP themselves all the time. It's a handy little shibboleth. If someone calls it CPC they're probably a bot.

CCP is a direct transliteration of the characters, so that's what it started as. Some time later China decided to change it but that's a lot of cultural inertia to move in a different direction.

Re: Our position on open-weights models

#155

Post by GodelNumbering »

In the first paragraph,

> Anyone who has read my past writing should know that I don’t regard such bans as a useful measure,

Later (on banning chip sales to china)

> we should crack down on the rampant smuggling and workarounds used to obtain access to such chips.

If you truly believe that bans don't work, the same applies to hardware too.

Furthermore, Dario says later "To address these concerns, I do support the following three measures...": 1. ban chip sales to China 2. crack down on distillation 3. all capable models should go through mandatory safety testing

Just so happens that all these moves commercially benefit Anthropic. If Dario really wanted to make a point, it would land a lot better had Anthropic released a single open-weights model

Re: Our position on open-weights models

#156

Post by reasonableklout »

x313 wrote: post #95
cogman10 wrote: post #28

> 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.

The USG has a safety organization (CAISI), but it has been neutered by the current administration (with the recent stop-work order etc.). Perhaps UK AISI would be closest to what you are looking for? See their recent work on Kimi K3 cyber (which was declared safe) [1].

It's tricky because a lot of the safety researchers have ties to the labs since those were the only companies training LLMs >5 years ago.

[1]: https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2026/07/uk-aisi-caisi-...

Re: Our position on open-weights models

#157

Post by ausbah »

wanting to ban your competitors via regulatory capture via the trump admin of all things shows how little of a backbone anthropic has

ofc half of them are of the ai rationalist lesswrong crowd so i think they’ve always been a little of their rocker

Re: Our position on open-weights models

#158

Post by tripleee »

x313 wrote: post #95
cogman10 wrote: post #28

> 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.

that's pretty damn smart if this was a long-term plan to block competitors

Re: Our position on open-weights models

#160

Post by alach11 »

What does cracking down on distillation look like in practice? I imagine data retention would be a part of the strategy, like we saw with Fable?

It seems really hard to allow usage via API and prevent distillation. Maybe limiting usage to within a specific harness would help a bit more. But ultimately the only way to prevent it is by locking down models to trusted entities (like with Glasswing). But then the profit potential of a model is significantly reduced. It really puts the labs in a bind.

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