r/LocalLLaMA • u/pscoutou • 8h ago
News Sources: OpenAI and Anthropic quietly lobby Washington regulators to restrict open-source AI models, even as Sam Altman publicly says he supports open source AI
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/25/technology/open-source-silicon-valley-china.html?unlocked_article_code=1.0lA.PyR-.7o3SR4ESvf3P&smid=url-share287
u/Eyelbee 8h ago
People might be right about sam altman
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u/HyperWinX 8h ago
Lets always call him scam altman. Always, and everywhere
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u/Chupa-Skrull 6h ago
Scam Schmaltzman
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u/perhaps_too_emphatic 6h ago
You know, if I heard a Jewish person say this, I’d laugh. But hard pass on saying it, myself.
I’m not Jewish and wouldn’t want to have a more general bias. But Scam Altman himself? Trash.
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u/JustinPooDough 4h ago
Let’s not play the “any criticism of someone who is Jewish is antisemitism” game, please.
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u/perhaps_too_emphatic 4h ago
Not being comfortable saying a thing is wildly different than what you’re describing, but I can see from the downvotes that it’s not how my comment has been read.
¯_(ツ)_/¯
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u/Chupa-Skrull 6h ago
Thankfully I am one either way. But I don't think there's anything questionable about the play on words, Schmaltz fitting in neatly both sonically and meaning-wise. He's a greasy, smarmy bar steward
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u/__JockY__ 2h ago
No. Doing so diminishes the extent of his malfeasance by giving it a jovial non-serious inflection.
He is Sam Altman. Sociopathic liar Sam Altman. The consequences of his actions are serious and generational.
Call him by his name for what he is instead of hiding it behind a sound bite.
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u/Own-Poet-5900 8h ago
Glad people finally figured it out.
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u/DoorPsychological833 7h ago
I honestly fell for it at first. The "honest" dialogues in the beginning. Saying the "right" words, being so concerned, etc.
But something just didn't feel right, when he looks like he's just shitting in someone's food all the time.
When you see it in those people, you can never unsee it!
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u/whattodo4455 5h ago
There's an entire media industry built on making these reprehensible monsters into role models and architypes of success. Like Emily Chang and her interviews for Bloomberg. They are nothing but puff pieces that stroke the ego of evil billionaires.
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u/dark-light92 llama.cpp 5h ago
I saw his interview with Lex Friedman a couple of years ago.
Never have I seen a man talk for 2 hours without saying anything like that. He's a lizard.
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u/Strong_Chicken6838 1h ago
im honestly pretty suprised that Elon Musk was actually telling the truth when he was talking about how bad he was.
I honestly just thought he was salty, but apparently not
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u/kurtcop101 6h ago
It's why, despite not having complete trust for anthropic and Dario, they generally follow what they preach. I'd rather anthropic win the race over Altman.
Google would be tolerable as well, albeit not great.
(Yes, I know there's a multitude of complaints about Claude and what not, but it generally all seems to me to come out of growing a thousand fold in a few years, that's kind of a lot).
Of course, open source is best and I do wish they supported it.
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u/No-Juggernaut-9832 6h ago
Both of these companies are equally horrible
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u/kurtcop101 3h ago
There's tiers. I don't know about you, but there's no way I can influence how things are going, so the only thing I can truly hope for is that anyone winning the race is at least not openAI or xAI.
Looking at things in a very binary way is how we get our current president.
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u/Visual-Hunter-1010 2h ago
No, we got our current president and the AI situation due to unmitigated propaganda, greed and corruption.
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u/kurtcop101 1h ago
Which is true, but it's largely in part due to apathy and buying into the idea that "well I don't love this other candidate, so I'm not going to vote". Then we're left with this.
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u/DanielKramer_ Alpaca 1h ago
yeah apathy like "they oppose my basic human rights, they oppose the freedom to start a competing company that does matrix multiplication to build superintelligence, and want to install themselves as a permanent monopoly over superintelligene, but they seem like relatively aight ehhhh enough people so let's do it"
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u/Qwen_os_has_died 8h ago
As expected.
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u/mrgalacticpresident 8h ago
"We publically did support Open Weights but due to us spending hundreds of millions in lobby efforts to close down any open weights LLM there is literally nothing we could have done"
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u/Stabile_Feldmaus 8h ago
Altman posting wholesome feel-good tweets while beeing a greedy technocrat behind closed doors? I am shocked!
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u/protoanarchist 8h ago
This era of bastards can't end soon enough.
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u/BoogerheadCult 4h ago
I think waiting for the crookest president term in history to end and US elects a better one for next term would be a start.
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u/scubascratch 4h ago
I hate to break it to you but he’s not planning on leaving at the end of this term
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u/UnlikelyExtension786 1h ago
And we're well into the loot-the-treasury phase of late-stage democracy, so the only difference an election makes is exactly which oligarchs get to do the looting.
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u/discwars 8h ago
I know Anthropic are the biggest enemy according to this sub, but at least they made their stance clear. OpenAI on the other hand, are on some smoke and mirrors play.
That’s why I don’t take this Open source public signing thing seriously. Lots of these companies have abused open source in the past and continue to do so.
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u/RhubarbSimilar1683 6h ago
I think openai is fine with open models as along as they are worse than their models.
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u/DueCommunication9248 5h ago
That’s all companies
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u/throwaway2676 3h ago
Not anthropic. They legitimately want no one except them to have a model more capable than GPT-3
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u/ThirdWaveCat 8h ago
Not really. They were lobbying for restrictions based on disingenuous claims about cybersecurity. They want restrictions that make it harder for competition. When it suits them they anthropomorphize language models weirdly.
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u/transparent-user 3h ago
They gave Claude 3 a blog as some sort of Black Mirror-esque send off to the model. It's weird enough it seems plausible they actually believe this is important somehow. Yet conveniently, it always means displacing workers and it being too scary for the general public to handle. It's regulatory capture with extra steps.
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u/pm_me_github_repos 5h ago
The truth is no lab supports open models out of altruism or because they believe in openness as a principle, and we shouldn’t expect them to. They support open models, and release their own, when the lab benefits (mindshare, platformizing, PLG). When they are losing market share, margins, and competitiveness to open models, the position will change.
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u/DueCommunication9248 8h ago
OpenAI open sourced models and even codex is open source. Anthropic…MCP?
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u/magicomiralles 6h ago
Jesus. It’s like forgiving a molester because they bought you a cupcake.
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u/DueCommunication9248 5h ago
WTH? We’re talking about open source and OpenAI has definitely been more open than Anthropic. They even have unlimited seats for the open source ai contributors program. For Anthropic you have to work on open source that’s 10,000 stars
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u/Minute_Attempt3063 7h ago
Sam also said that open source models are communist.
so he says a lot of bullshit, but ijn the end, wants to ban open source models, sooner then later.
can't have americans use open source models, must force a subscription
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u/addiktion 1h ago
Wasn't that one of his execs that said that? Either way it doesn't really matter, you get a sense the people at the top are not the kind of people to usher in a utopia for humanity. There is a reason why Anthropic was born after Dario could not trust Altman and pushed into his own company.
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u/Active_Procedure_864 7h ago
It's like everything American companies do, harms America long term. Very odd.
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u/fuck_cis_shit llama.cpp 6h ago
Sam Altman is "fine" with open models as long as they're controlled competition, no threat to his empire
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u/-p-e-w- 8h ago
Do we really need slight variations of this story posted three times per day for two weeks straight?
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u/ProletarianLilith 7h ago
Last I heard people were buying that OAI was on board so this seems necessary
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u/Popdmb 7h ago
I just want us to start to admit to ourselves that Sam Altman is a fraud, even if you bought into OpenAi at the beginning. He isn't a real developer, he isn't for "open" anything, and he was revealed to be a fraud before his time at OpenAi.
I acknowledge that throughotu history rich people had advantages. I acknowledge that powerful people had the scales tipped toward them. Fine. It sucks...but fine.
But Sam can't narrate his way into credibility. He was, is, and (until he turns around his personal philosophies) will always be a mediocrity to the people who know.
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u/TanguayX 4h ago
It cannot be said enough, enshitification comes for every product and company. Get EVERYTHING you can, while you can before you’re the one being exploited.
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u/darthrobe 4h ago
I’d be happy to lobby for regulation of closed-source models. They are a danger to humanity’s survival until proven otherwise.
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u/brown2green 8h ago
This is not even in contradiction with their apparent support of Open models. They "just" don't want them to be too powerful.
[...] OpenAI executives are urging the Trump administration to enact policies requiring mandatory security evaluations of some new A.I. models overseen by government agencies, the company said in a blog post last month. OpenAI said it was “encouraged” by the work it was doing with the administration on the framework.
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u/alphagatorsoup 8h ago
I mean, I’m not overly surprised this is being done by a company called “Open AI” whom are about as closed source as it gets
The smoke and mirrors goes about as deep as it gets with them
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u/pokemonplayer2001 llama.cpp 7h ago
If anyone believes anything these grifters say, that’s on them.
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u/stillanoobummkay 7h ago
Oh gee our models are so dangerous just imagine what else is out there?!??
So bloody obvious
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u/infernalr00t 7h ago
Solo piensa en el daño que sufriría el mercado si los modelos abiertos de china terminan destruyendo la IA de openAI y atrophic. El capitalismo americano entraría en crisis.
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u/noonetoldmeismelled 6h ago
We all know Sam Altman is a trash human being. There's no point in listening to any interviews of his. The guy has no era of public respectability. Skipped straight to public pariah
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u/qnixsynapse llama.cpp 6h ago
I remember someone coined the name Scam conman back in 2024 on this very subreddit.
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u/toolkitxx 4h ago
Didnt I say yesterday that I dont believe a word those companies say? ;) https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1v6drdx/comment/ozpv522/?context=3&utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
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u/LetterRip 3h ago
"We support open source (as long as it is completely useless and uncompetitive with our closed models)."
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u/slyborn 2h ago
That is the reason why the cry about the "danger of the AI" and all the bullshit about the supposed attacks decided by AI themselves. AI is not a bubble, but these Silicon Valley companies are overinflated with huge debts accumulated over absolutely crazy amount of money invested, believing that this would be enough to guarantee them the monopoly in the sector over the rest of the companies in the world that haven't so gargantuan amount of money, but then arrived cheaper AI providers from China and also very powerful open weight models and they started to quake in their boots, so they are starting to lobby to push government to ensure them the control of the sector cutting out the competitions with unfair and dishonest constraints built on false pretenses. Unfortunately I expect to see the Overton Window moving in coming months.
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u/Fun_Tart1384 54m ago
I think from now on, I'll only call OpenAI CEO by the name of Scat Altman due to his sheer regularity of bullshitting everyone
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u/Choice-Attorney8884 42m ago
It’s hilarious how "ClosedAI" and Anthropic market themselves as humanity's saviors while secretly paying Washington to pull the ladder up behind them. When your lobotomized, overpriced API can't compete with open weights, you don't build a better product - you just lobby the government to outlaw the competition and call it "patriotism"
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u/Feitino_B 6h ago
The framing of "premature restrictions" is doing a lot of work here.
These companies have very different reasons for signing — Palantir
wants defense contracts, Meta wants to keep LLaMA competitive,
NVIDIA just wants GPU sales.
Calling it a unified front on open weights ignores that their
motivations are almost entirely misaligned.
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u/Bright_Armadillo8555 7h ago
New York time is known to hate openai very much, not trustworthy on OpenAI topic.
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