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Our position on open-weights models

anthropic.com

301–310 of 1001 posts

Re: Our position on open-weights models

#301
> 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, and use them to achieve permanent military superiority or perpetrate incredibly deep repression of their own people

But what if it's the US that becomes authoritarian and uses AI models to perpetrate incredibly deep repression of their own people?

Re: Our position on open-weights models

#302
China doesn't seem to think that powerful open weight models are a serious threat to them. Otherwise they wouldn't release them. Those models could also be used by their enemies against China.

I'm not a fan of the Chinese political system, but they usually think things through, and do smart things for their benefit.

Re: Our position on open-weights models

#303
Imagine regulating a programming language. I remember when Delphi, Vb6, .net, etc was used often to create Remote Access Trojans and viruses were widespread. Companies didn't compete to ban other languages. Crime is crime. What would regulating open-weight models do for people that actually intend on using these tools for crime ?

Re: Our position on open-weights models

#304

Wow, so much cynicism and distrust in the comments, to the level of conspiracy theory, in my opinion. Yeah, this is the company that fairly recently refused to allow the government to use its models for autonomous weapons or mass surveillance, and refused to remove its guardrails. Am not saying we should take what Dario is saying at face value, but he already has shown by his actual actions that he can be well intent…

There is a massive anti anthropic psyop. Not sure who who is behind it buts it's happening.

Re: Our position on open-weights models

#305
post #226

"open weight" models are not open source. They are still deeply proprietary. It is not possible to know what they do or what they are capable of without interrogating them since we have no access to their source materials. The only difference is the Chinese labs have allowed 3rd party inference providers run the proprietary models for them since they cannot do it themselves due to domestic GPU compute constraints.

I...don't follow. How in the world does your comment about open weight and open source relate? Ignoring that it has nothing to do with this post (did you mean to reply to someone), are you aware that Anthropic, OpenAI and others allow 3rd party inference providers to run their proprietary models? Like, what does this non-sequitur even mean?

You understand Moonshot AI could have had other parties run inference for them without releasing the weights, right? These two points are utterly unrelated, unless you think Fable and GPT5-6 are also "open weight" because other providers are providing inference?

Further, having access to the source material in no universe allows you to know what a model is "capable of". I'm not sure how this follows.

Re: Our position on open-weights models

#306
>We should not sell powerful chips or chipmaking equipment to China, and we should crack down on the rampant smuggling3 and workarounds used to obtain access to such chips. China has limited domestic production capacity, and therefore, due to the scaling laws, cannot build more powerful models than the US without US chips. This is the most efficient and direct way to block threat #1, and by hampering the training of models that are out of reach of US law, it also indirectly helps with threat #2.

If hardware becomes affordable for the masses, then Anthropic current business model is at risk.

Re: Our position on open-weights models

#307

> 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…

Yeah, this response is pure propaganda, say one thing in the headline and the opposite in the body.

Anthropic does not support a ban on open models, except for any models that aren’t closed.

Re: Our position on open-weights models

#308
post #172

To everyone here pushing for total proliferation of open models -- what should be done about open weight bioweapon and cyber-offense capabilities? Is it simply the cost of freedom that we should allow attackers to access these tools? The OpenAI / Hugging Face incident shows what a GPT 5.6 level model can do off the leash; within ~6 months, open weight models will match this and every bad actor under the sun will be a…

> what should be done about open weight bioweapon Does not exist. What has in fact happened is some cults had bioweapons programs but any failure points were at deployment. (Aum Shinrikyo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo_subway_sarin_attack and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_Rajneeshee_bioterror_atta... ) > and cyber-offense capabilities? You mean defense. That's how things get hardened. Anyone that was workin…

I don't think the Aum case points the way you're describing: they used a non-pathogenic strain of anthrax because they didn't know any better. That's a knowledge failure.

But even then, the debate isn't about whether open weight bioweapons exist today: it's about whether they will exist in the future. I think Amodei's argument here makes a lot of sense: "what I believe currently keeps us safe in biology is not 'defenders', or even the availability of materials, but a negative correlation between intellectual capability and desire to commit catastrophic harm. Previous technologies like internet search or even DNA synthesis were nowhere near powerful enough to break this correlation, but I worry that at its current rate of progress, AI will do so very soon."

(I'm not just spouting off; I put my time where my mouth is. I used to work in big tech, but I left for a much less well-paying job building an early-warning system for engineered pandemics.)

Re: Our position on open-weights models

#309

> 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…

When Fable was yanked, it was said to be (in part) due to the "jailbreak" of instructing Fable to "fix this code" — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48552687 Dumb question. If "Mythos-class" models are such a problem, then... why not just let it fix everyone's code? There can't be more than a few million to tens of millions software businesses / services / regularly used F/OSS projects on Earth. Why not just give…

> Dumb question. If "Mythos-class" models are such a problem, then... why not just let it fix everyone's code?

That's basically project Glasswing; mixing responsible disclosure with frontier exploit generators.

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