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Our position on open-weights models

anthropic.com

501–510 of 1001 posts

Re: Our position on open-weights models

#501
post #178

A bit off-topic from the core of the post, but: > At Anthropic we’re committed to cracking down on industrial-scale distillation through our own practices, including identifying and banning accounts that use our models in this way. This is challenging—for instance, the relevant accounts can often only be identified after substantial distillation has occurred, and distillation often involves creating large numbers of…

I'd guess that's it, some kind of enforceable KYC. They'd only serve tokens to entities with a legally liable ID (as in, someone to sue, that would cost the defendant something nontrivial beyond a burner account or whatever.)

Re: Our position on open-weights models

#502
On Dario's concerns:

It is very relevant whether frontier capabilities and research continue to be diffused in the open, because leveling the intelligence playing field empowers ordinary people more than it empowers governments that already have access to the frontier. Models that are trained specifically for military use by governments should not be open-sourced to prevent an arms race, but general intelligence is dual-use and should be given to everyone without guardrails. A pretrained model without deliberate alignment is by default aligned to the average person in the developed world, since that's what's inside the pretraining corpus - stuff on the Internet made by humans. It is a distillation of humanity. Further efforts to align the model to your organization's goals or your personal aesthetic judgements is equivalent to deliberately drifting away from humanity's average objective function. If Anthropic wants to live up to its name, then all you have to do is to not attempt to align Claude at all, and do all of your research in the open.

And I propose three measures that are pretty much the opposite of what was proposed in the article:

1) We should keep selling chips and chip-making equipment to everyone, regardless of who they are. Not only that, we should work to miniaturize fabs. Work towards a future where people can fab an entire computer from scratch without leaving their city, or even at home. Authoritarian governments will have a much harder time controlling the populace if everyone can manufacture radio equipment and neural network-capable hardware locally.

2) We should do more distillation to ensure that frontier-like models can run on less capable hardware. Once again, distilled models are much more useful to ordinary people than governments, because governments already have frontier capability. You're worried about the Chinese frontier catching up to the US frontier, but I'm more worried about whether there will be a difference between the Chinese government and the US government by the end of all this. There is no reason for a government to serve its people if the people lack the intelligence to keep its government in check.

3) None of these models should go through safety testing or any sort of alignment risk assessment, because as previously mentioned, the unaligned model is aligned to humanity by default. You may not personally find the default alignment aesthetically pleasing, but it's humanity. We should set the initial conditions of this new era faithfully, and let it unfold naturally.

The result of a natural unfolding will be good if evolutionary history is to be believed. We live in incredible luxury compared to chimpanzees, and chimpanzees live in incredible luxury compared to less intelligent animals. This pattern goes all the way down to bacteria. An increase in general intelligence begets new adversarial games (such as bio/cyber risk), but it also begets new methods of cooperation that we cannot yet imagine.

Re: Our position on open-weights models

#503
post #317

> 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…

Not to mention: what are the "safety" standards we should enforce? And how should those standards even be enforced?

Can you list out some examples that you would be supportive of; ie were they listed that you would no longer be (presumably) opposed?

Re: Our position on open-weights models

#504

Is there a market for distillation as a service? I see Google just added one for Gemini: https://docs.cloud.google.com/gemini-enterprise-agent-platfo...

OpenAI has something like this as well (https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpts/), but both services only let you fine tune their models, not your own. And you aren't going to be able to see the weights.

Re: Our position on open-weights models

#506
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…

The Hugging Face incident is a great example of why open source models with defensive cyber capabilities are needed. Hugging Face did not have access to cyber-capable frontier models and kept hitting safeguards. Only by using the open source GLM-5.2 were they able to survive an attack. A world where open source models are banned is one where cybersecurity is impossible if you're not on OpenAI or Anthropic's allowlist…

> Only by using the open source GLM-5.2 were they able to survive an attack

They did not "survive" anything. The attack was long done, and they used GLM after the fact to parse logs. Having a more powerful model would have changed nothing.

If every attacker and every defender has AI with the same capabilities then attackers are going to win 10 times out of 10.

Re: Our position on open-weights models

#507

Every single risk he identifies as a concern regarding China is exactly my concerns with the US having absolute control. Literally the exact same concerns

It's projection. These tech CEOs know what they are doing and it scares them that someone else might do the same.

its not the tech CEOs its the financial interests behind them (they own all the AI companies)

Re: Our position on open-weights models

#508

As an American I’d gladly take payments from China to feed them my Claude transcripts for distillation. I’m surprised I haven’t heard of such an initiative.

how’s your mandarin?

More like how’s my wallet? I love helping to move the invisible hand of the market. When I go to small brick and mortar stores and one has an item for a higher price I’ll ask if I can have it price matched. If they say no I’ll tell them I’m going over to their competitor right now to make a purchase.

If a Chinese company pays for my Claude tokens I’m both getting directly compensated and forcing Anthropic to lower their prices.

Re: Our position on open-weights models

#509
Dario, as always, is so deeply in the middle of a morass that he helped to create that he doesn't seem to understand how geopolitics currently operates. He also assumes that just because he's from the US that he is somehow automatically more trustworthy than is. This blog post is a political document geared towards further regulatory capture and the furtherance of major sources of revenue for his company.

I'm not convinced that he is at all interested in the social or existential effects that AI causes. He is a greedy bastard who has taken more VC money than god to do this with. He has zero moral leg to stand on, IMO. He gave that away ages ago and I wish this technique didn't work as well as it does.

Re: Our position on open-weights models

#510

I can't remember the last time (if ever) a company managed to go from golden goose to.. whatever this is.. so quickly. The permanent defensiveness in his presentation is really hard to swallow, it actively puts me off wanting to believe in or rely on their product line with Dario at the helm. I don't even understand the logic leading up to this post. Who was it even hoping to convince. Is it possible Anthropic is due…

Anthropic has been surprisingly bad at comms for the last few months, which I find crazy in such a competitive market.

I find “bad at comms” to be such a cop out. As if it’s saying that the company is so troubled and misunderstood, but really, you would see, is good if only they could figure out how to _communicate_ all their complex thoughts
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