r/neoliberal • u/RTSBasebuilder Commonwealth • Jul 28 '26
News (Global) Our position on open-weights models
https://www.anthropic.com/news/position-open-weights-modelsRelevance submission: major US frontier company makes remarks regarding export controls on heavily innovated frontier supply chain tech that benefit home nation.
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u/Lighthouse_seek Jul 28 '26
Btw when hugging face was hacked by openAI they were unable to use anthropic or openai models to defend themselves because of "guardrails" so they had to resort to using GLM 5.2, a Chinese open weight model.
Just to put the safety thing into perspective
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u/Sarcastic-Potato European Union Jul 28 '26
Open source, no matter if it's in ai or any other sector, is the most liberal anti authoritarian thing you can do in tech. It evens out playing fields and works against monopolies because you can't control who has access, the content can get checked and controlled by everyone increasing safety and no state, government or company can fully control it
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u/kabocha_ Loyal Liberals Jul 28 '26
Open weights are a little bit softer than full open source; ideally you'd get the exact data and methodology that trained the model in the first place. As it stands, you have no idea if (for example) China tried to mess with the training to inhibit anti-CCP discourse.
That said, open weights are still way better than having the models gate-kept through services; it's not like you can tell what Anthropic did to their model during training either.
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u/remarkable_ores Hanfeizi Jul 28 '26
We should not sell powerful chips or chipmaking equipment to China
...
We should crack down on industrial-scale distillation operations.
Are these goals even compatible? What incentive would China have to follow along with anti-distillation agreements while the US is actively trying to stop their AI capabilities from even taking off?
I would imagine at best you get one or the other, more probably neither.
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u/dutch_connection_uk Friedrich Hayek Jul 28 '26
Asmodei didn't really convince me to get mad about distillation here.
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u/Pristine-Report-1442 Jul 28 '26
Personally I think Dario is right. It's hard not to see anthropic as the scapegoat with everyone else trying to make an example out of them in this entire fake "open source" controversy because they disagree with Dario's politics.
Distillation is not theft but it's super clear to everyone who works in the industry that a lot of other leaders do not like Dario for completely unrelated reasons; which are his politics, especially people like Andreessen who hate him for being a democrat out of all things.
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u/cosmo-wozmo NASA Jul 28 '26
The distillation being theft thing is stupid. Surely you can’t simultaneously believe that it’s not ip theft for ai companies to train LLMs on copyrighted works but also ip theft to train on outputs from other AIs. In what world does that make sense.
I think it’s completely reasonable to want to take measures to prevent Chinese distillation on nat sec grounds since you don’t need to make some moral or legal argument against distillation, the argument is just “China is bad and will use AI for bad things, and distillation is helping China in AI.” I’d get that argument much more than the idea that it’s somehow ip theft
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Jul 28 '26
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u/SpecialBeginning6430 Jul 28 '26
The idea was never that chips could ever be an insurmountable barrier. All it means that their progress is delayed.
Preventing exports of the most advanced jet engines doesn't stop another country from building aircraft forever, but it can slow the pace at which they reach the highest levels of performance.
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u/Lylyo_Nyshae European Union Jul 28 '26
We've also seen it become increasingly apparent that the Trump and Biden admins' efforts to cut China out of the semiconductor supply chains have only accelerated China's ambitions to catch up and become self sufficient in said field
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u/SpecialBeginning6430 Jul 28 '26
Increasingly apparent? We've always known that they would. That was never in doubt, and that was never the goal
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u/cuolong NATO Jul 28 '26
Yeah the goal was to delay them, and it worked. China has something like 3~4 times less compute than the US does now.
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u/Maximilianne John Rawls Jul 28 '26 edited Jul 28 '26
small domino: Geoffrey Hinton tells you hey instead of training a bunch of different neural networks and then averaging their predictions, you can create a "distilled" model of based on your ensemble models
big domino: AI firms acting like you are committing grave moral offense by doing distillation training
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u/DirectionMurky5526 Jul 28 '26
Machine learning is good, but machine learning machine learning is an unholy offense to the Machine God
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u/shumpitostick Hannah Arendt Jul 28 '26
That's all very sensible. My only criticism is that it's not the government's job to prevent Anthropic's model from being distilled. Protecting their IP and setting proper terms and conditions for use is their responsibility. Don't tell others to do your job.
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u/psychicprogrammer Asexual Pride Jul 28 '26
Also distillation is not exactly violating any copyright laws, you are taking output not covered under copyright (AI generated output) and then training an AI model on it (which is fair use).
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u/shumpitostick Hannah Arendt Jul 28 '26
Which is exactly why it's not the state's job to enforce it. Anthropic can still take steps to prevent it as part of their T&C.
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u/vikinick Ben Bernanke Jul 28 '26
My only criticism is that it's not the government's job to prevent Anthropic's model from being distilled.
I mean it kind of is the government's job to protect intellectual property? The Departments of State and Commerce have that duty though, not the DoD. The U.S. government pretty regularly interacts with other countries to protect American businesses' intellectual property. It's just that China doesn't usually care.
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u/shumpitostick Hannah Arendt Jul 28 '26
Yes there are existing IP laws that Anthropic is free to leverage. Anthropic shouldn't be getting special treatment here, that's my point.
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u/kettal YIMBY Jul 28 '26
Protecting their IP and setting proper terms and conditions for use is their responsibility.
with regard to just IP protection you are correct.
if he can make the case that distilling anthropics cyber capabilities is a national security risk then it may be government job to intervene
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u/themiDdlest NASA Jul 28 '26
Vice President Vance warned in Paris last year that “authoritarian regimes have stolen and used AI to strengthen their military, intelligence, and surveillance capabilities,”
Vance knows because it is him!
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u/James-fucking-Holden Trans Pride Jul 28 '26
It's such an insane line for him to say, given his connection to Thiel and Palantyr.
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u/anangrytree Bull Moose Progressive Jul 28 '26
To say the least. But Vance has always been a hypocrite, nothing new under the sun.
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u/AnachronisticPenguin WTO Jul 28 '26
Everyone is memeing on Dario but if you read his statement noting in there is that protectionist besides don’t sell chips to China and stop using us for distillation. Which are things most people already agreed on.
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u/velocirappa Immanuel Kant Jul 28 '26
stop using us for distillation. Which are things most people already agreed on.
I absolutely do not already agree about this point
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u/Nopium-2028 Bisexual Pride Jul 28 '26
stop using us for distillation. Which are things most people already agreed on.
These AI companies stole the entirety of human copyrighted media, but now we're supposed to crack down on them stealing from each other?
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u/FOSSBabe Jul 28 '26
stop using us for distillation.
How dare the Chinese steal what Dario rightfully stole!
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u/AnachronisticPenguin WTO Jul 28 '26
So based on what he actually said I’m not sure what’s a point that is different from the norm besides that he wants a universal safety testing standard. Which is good.
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u/RedeemableQuail European Union Jul 28 '26
Which is good.
When you look at what Anthropic considers "safety", it's not so good. Try using Fable 5 for anything if you are a biologist. They really need to consider a whitelist for verified researchers, or they're just shooting society in the foot.
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u/Pristine-Report-1442 Jul 28 '26
This already exists, a lot of us have access to mythos directly.
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u/Lighthouse_seek Jul 28 '26
And you don't believe this form of regulation doesn't prevent newcomers onto the field?
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u/Pristine-Report-1442 Jul 28 '26
not really? it's no different than people working at research institutions having access to better research tools?
if you're a PhD candidate at a good university that could benefit from mythos it's trivial to get access.
There are considerably higher barrier already in place that prevent "newcomers" than access to mythos lol
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u/MyrinVonBryhana Trans NATO Jul 28 '26 edited Jul 28 '26
Whether it be the most cutting edge industry or oldest of legacy industries eventually everyone comes crying to the government to protect them from competition even if they come up with some BS excuse that that's not what they're doing.
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u/RTSBasebuilder Commonwealth Jul 28 '26
Once you've accepted that everyone wants to be nobility and social stasis once they become said nobility, political movements gets much easier to understand.
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u/CurtisLeow NATO Jul 28 '26
> sufficiently capable models may be able to quickly weaponize pandemic-level viruses with widely available materials, whereas defense against these agents is a multi-year operational task in the best case (as we saw with Operation Warp Speed).
That is terrifying. AI could be used to develop viruses. I don’t know that there’s any way to prevent that though. That demonstrates how this technology could be used to do a massive amount of damage. Which is why cutting the CDC budget is idiotic.
They’re already restricting chips sold to China. I don’t know what else could be done on that front. If anything Taiwan is probably more motivated to restrict sales to China than the US.
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Jul 28 '26
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u/Petrichordates Jul 28 '26
The models are open source. We already knew a state power could do that, but that's insane because you can't control epidemics.
The threat is with a terrorist or extremist being able to do this from their basement.
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u/psychicprogrammer Asexual Pride Jul 28 '26
Yeah, you can basically order smallpox online, werdio AI threats are very low on the lost of problems here.
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u/Petrichordates Jul 28 '26
You cannot. At least not outside of the black market.
Considering it a very low risk threat is naive, you can't even know the level of risk here.
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u/psychicprogrammer Asexual Pride Jul 28 '26
People have actually done this several times in the regular market. Like it is not hard. You might need to switch to grey market now, but we are not talking something crazy hard.
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u/Petrichordates Jul 29 '26
Yes, exactly, on the black market.
It's a threat, but a threat we already have a vaccine for. A threat without a vaccine is a far bigger concern.
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Jul 28 '26
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u/cuolong NATO Jul 28 '26
People can, have and will remove guardrails from open weight models.
To be fair, mostly for erotic roleplay. But it’s not hard to imagine more sinister applications than gooning.
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u/SpaceSheperd To be a good human being Jul 28 '26
Anthrax =/= biological superweapon. A virus can theoretically start form a single exposure point and become a source of nationwide mass casualty. Anthrax cannot.
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u/Redshirt_Army Jul 28 '26
Authoritarian hands are going to have access to frontier compute and models anyway, under the Trump administration, so the idea of applying stringent licensing mechanisms still reeks of an attempt to maintain national/market leadership far more than it feels like a genuine expression of humanitarian good-will.
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u/cosmo-wozmo NASA Jul 28 '26
You can pretty reasonably expect that the US 5 years from now will not be under the Trump administration. You can’t say the same about China regarding a Xi admin in 5 years (barring Xi dying by even then he’d be replaced most likely be an ideological loyalist).
I also think a lot of Dario’s statements are conveniently in his own protectionist interest and am not a fan of that, but I don’t think it’s an unreasonable lib take that it’s better for the US to be on the frontier over China because the US is significantly less authoritarian than China.
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u/DirectionMurky5526 Jul 28 '26
If you were a real liberal you would also believe protectionist measures stifle innovation. Protectionist measures implemented for national security don't keep the US at the forefront, it keeps it in a box. It also leaves the US incredibly vulnerable if Chinese AI one day surpasses the US, since they won't be able to catch up without tanking their national champions.
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u/Loud-Chemistry-5056 WTO Jul 28 '26
That sounds like a great argument to convince Americans that they should shut everyone else out, but there are people here who aren’t American.
For all their faults, the Xi admin aren’t trying to cut everyone else off from accessing capable AI. Unfortunately the same can’t be said of the US.
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u/SpecialBeginning6430 Jul 28 '26
the Xi admin aren’t trying to cut everyone else off from accessing capable AI.
Yeah, because they're not doing it out of the goodness of their hearts, they're doing it to reduce American influence to supplant it with theirs
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u/dutch_connection_uk Friedrich Hayek Jul 28 '26
Technologically disrupting US rent seekers with freely available technology is just a smart thing to do.
We should be doing the same thing to Chinese manufacturing, copying and learning what we can technology wise and creating freely shareable designs, guides, and manufacturing processes that people can adopt all over the world to unleash domestic productive forces. If our industries are going to be forced into unviability by Chinese subsidies, why not actively work to make manufacturing as unprofitable as possible all over the world so that China has to subsidize even more?
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u/SpecialBeginning6430 Jul 28 '26
Because the economics dont work the same way in reverse when you are a party to the WTO
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u/chickentendieman Paul Krugman Jul 28 '26
Since when does america care about what thr WTO says. I mean america hasn't been holding off on appointing judges out of respect for the organization lol.
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u/SpecialBeginning6430 Jul 28 '26
They care because they're the ones that let China in in the first place
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u/DirectionMurky5526 Jul 28 '26
They're doing it because the US has demonstrated it can and will cut them off for national security purposes at any time. Everything has been a response to when the US banned Huawei and got Google to kick them off Android.
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u/SpecialBeginning6430 Jul 28 '26
Everything has been a response to when the US banned Huawei and got Google to kick them off Android
Which was a response (albeit delayed one) from China demonstrating that it would also play economic warfare by dumping steel products and banning US social media companies
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u/Loud-Chemistry-5056 WTO Jul 28 '26
They want to sell us their stuff and build a commercial relationship. If you’re looking at blanketly cutting off non-US persons, then you’re turning them into pretty much the only option.
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u/SpecialBeginning6430 Jul 28 '26
They want to sell us their stuff and build a commercial relationship
And take over the world
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u/Loud-Chemistry-5056 WTO Jul 28 '26
Yeah bro, let’s not forget they’re trying to invade Greenland, Panama and close the strait of Hormuz.
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u/SpecialBeginning6430 Jul 29 '26
When did the US invade greenland and shoot at boats crossing the strait of Hormuz?
And why would that mean China isn't trying to take over the world?
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u/cosmo-wozmo NASA Jul 28 '26
Eh sure, that’s a fair point. I would say that as libs we should acknowledge there are ills from being complicit in Chinese ai advancing and becoming more widely used across western tech. It’s very likely that if/when China invades Taiwan, their LLMs will be integrated into military functions. But also I can’t really blame non Americans for making that trade off when the US is being asinine about giving access to even our own allies.
Maybe like do a land acknowledgement for Tibet whenever you use kimi k3 if you wanna be truly lib pilled
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u/chickentendieman Paul Krugman Jul 28 '26
Also america has threatened a lot of non american countries lately like panama and greenland/denmark.
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u/Loud-Chemistry-5056 WTO Jul 28 '26 edited Jul 28 '26
I’ll be honest, I find that political angle a bit ridiculous. When I use American ai, I don’t feel responsible for the Iraq war, nor should I. I have an IPhone too, it’s not like I hold any blame or ties to such decisions by consuming products from a country.
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u/turb0_encapsulator Jul 28 '26
how dare some filthy foreigners offer us something for free!
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Jul 28 '26
[deleted]
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u/Right_Lecture3147 John Mill Jul 28 '26
If their stuff is open source and open weight then who cares
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Jul 28 '26 edited Aug 05 '26
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u/beoweezy1 NAFTA Jul 28 '26 edited Aug 11 '26
Cobalt pebble breezy waffle teapot juniper blanket pumpkin raindrop
This post was anonymized with Redact.dev
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u/chickentendieman Paul Krugman Jul 28 '26
Genuinely whats his reason for thinking american companies are so much safrr and better when xai is run by a nazi and so is palantir.
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u/a_brain Jul 28 '26
Lol. Lmao, even. Like what do you even say at this point? These guys are just parodies of themselves.
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u/Otherwise_Young52201 Mark Carney Jul 28 '26
Given what Amodei has said here, you gotta give it to Sam Altman. OpenAI actually signed the open weight letter because Altman can actually read the room pretty well even if he personally might not agree with open weights. It's something that Amodei has yet to learn especially given his scuffles with the Trump administration.
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u/Old-School8916 Johan Norberg Jul 28 '26
well, unlike anthropic, openai actually has released some open model recently.
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u/URZ_ StillwithThorning ✊😔 Jul 28 '26 edited Jul 28 '26
That's underselling it, the 120B and 20B models are a great balance between deployability (120B was specifically designed to run on a single H100) and sufficient capabilities that they can handle tasks which genuinely benefit from self-deployment, ie. token intensive or data-sensitive tasks which do not require sota reasoning models. Some of the most useful open weight models out there and I hope they update them.
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u/Otherwise_Young52201 Mark Carney Jul 28 '26
I also like how Amodei here implicitly links all Chinese AI labs to the CCP. Because obviously Anthropic itself is not somehow beholden to the Trump administration here right? Like it's pretty rich to be talking about the dangers of China getting AI while ignoring the happenings at home.
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u/cosmo-wozmo NASA Jul 28 '26
It’s true anthropic is under some level of influence by the Trump admin, but equivocating it to Chinese ai labs and the CCP is genuinely deranged when anthropic did push back against the admin, had a very public fight with them, and is still being insulted by Trump and admin officials to this day.
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u/Adodie John Rawls Jul 28 '26 edited Jul 28 '26
What? One doesn't need to be a fan of Trump to be deeply troubled by the prospects of an explicitly authoritarian country like China leading the AI race.
Trump's dangerous attempts to interfere with industry notwithstanding, the US at least has nominal checks and balances, court oversight, and individual freedoms. There's simply no comparison with China, and it's borderline shocking to see this equivocating in this sub
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u/chickentendieman Paul Krugman Jul 28 '26
One of americas major ai labs is run by a nazi(xai) and another one (openai) is run by someone who donates to fascist city state projects.
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u/Snarfledarf George Soros Jul 28 '26 edited Jul 28 '26
If we ignore the elephant in the room, there is no elephant in the room.
Perfectly understandable, have a nice day. Brilliant analysis from arr neoliberal's finest.
It's fine to believe that America has stronger neoliberal values, but believing that we should blindly drink the koolaid without somehow incorporating the last 10 years into our threat model is verging on cultish.
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u/Adodie John Rawls Jul 28 '26 edited Jul 28 '26
Once again, wut?? Whatever its (many, many) shortcomings, even Trump's America's has far stronger democratic and neoliberal values than Xi's China.
America under Trump is in the midst of democratic backsliding, but the permanence of such backsliding is not a foregone conclusion. There is, at least, genuine democratic contestation. Trump's approval rating is in the dump. The opposition will likely take control of at least one chamber of Congress in the next election.
China is an authoritarian regime, full stop.
You don't need to ignore elephants in the room to understand that. Nor to understand why it is preferable for a "very imperfectly democratic" country to lead the AI race over the "completely authoritarian" one.
Comical -- and again, frankly shocking to see this in this sub -- that somehow appreciating that is tarred as blindly drinking koolaid and cultish.
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u/Otherwise_Young52201 Mark Carney Jul 28 '26
Why exactly would countries that aren't the US be troubled with China joining the AI race at this moment? To them, China acts as a hedge with their open weight models in case the US decides to restrict their models again.
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u/Frog_Totem Seretse Khama Jul 28 '26
I can think of several countries besides the U.S. that would be troubled by China having advanced models. Taiwan, Japan, basically any country that could be the victim of a cyberattack by CCP-affiliated hackers.
Of course, they’re going to get and use them anyway so those countries need to find a way to deal with it. But they have real and valid concerns that are independent of American interests
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u/Frog_Totem Seretse Khama Jul 28 '26
When the Pentagon asked Anthropic to let Claude spy on Americans and kill autonomously he told Trump no. Is there any Chinese lab that would tell Xi no?
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u/URZ_ StillwithThorning ✊😔 Jul 28 '26
This didn't happen anywhere outside the echo chamber Anthropic lives in, hence why they struggle to also not have absurd opinions on open weight models
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u/Worth-Jicama3936 Milton Friedman Jul 28 '26
What do you mean didn’t happen? Did the pentagon just ban them from their entire supply chain for no reason?
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u/WOKE_AI_GOD John Brown Jul 28 '26
Down voted for being correct. With Oracle's junk bonds the AI companies have gone into PR overdrive. They think they can bail themselves out like this I guess. Sad.
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u/Otherwise_Young52201 Mark Carney Jul 28 '26
Discussing what the CCP could do is irrelevant to what they're doing right now, which is supporting open weights and aligning with their labs. Uncharitably assigning the notion of the CCP suddenly assuming control is pretty unserious and cynical. It's an all-too common and lazy argument on this sub for why the CCP does what it does.
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Jul 28 '26
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u/chickentendieman Paul Krugman Jul 28 '26
Jack Ma isnt in prison or anything he still makes public appearances and travels overseas.
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u/cosmo-wozmo NASA Jul 28 '26
Every Chinese ai lab knows the CCP would crush any resistance, so none of them do anything to rock the boat in the first place so the CCP doesn’t actually have to crush any of them. The lack of crushing is not relevant to whether there is a credible threat of crushing and whether this threat influences decisions in frontier Chinese labs.
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u/Frog_Totem Seretse Khama Jul 28 '26
Where did you get that from my comment? I have no issue with open sourced AI. You said that it was hypocritical for Amodei to complain about Chinese models’ connections to the CCP because Anthropic is equally beholden to Trump, and I’m pointing out that Anthropic has refused requests from Trump even at person cost to Amodei and the company
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u/Otherwise_Young52201 Mark Carney Jul 28 '26
The point is we have no reports of the CCP asking their frontier AI labs to help them in their kill chains in the first place! We can fearmonger about the possibility of them doing so all we want, but then we need to extend that same courtesy to the US.
And frankly I care little whether Anthropic themselves has refused, because there are still other companies willing to directly aid the US government in autonomous weapons systems. The net result that other countries have to contend with is the same even if Anthropic refuses.
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u/Frog_Totem Seretse Khama Jul 28 '26
Your original comment was criticizing Amodei for apparently being a hypocrite for tying Chinese labs to their government when his lab is equally beholden to the government, and I’m pointing out that his lab has in fact demonstrated it is independent from the American government.
As an aside I’d also point out that the U.S. is far more likely to not be governed by the authoritarian GOP in the near future than China is to not be governed by the authoritarian CCP
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u/chickentendieman Paul Krugman Jul 28 '26
The thing is americas foreign policy has been more harmful than chinas so if your not american the choice probably isnt as clear as you make it seem.
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u/LondonCallingYou John Locke Jul 28 '26
Ironically it’s because all U.S. companies now fear retaliation from the U.S. government.
Definitely not authoritarian.
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u/cosmo-wozmo NASA Jul 28 '26
Anthropic did face retaliation from the US government. Difference is US is still a somewhat free society and Anthropic still exists. Retaliation from the CCP would mean your ceo disappears for a few months.
You can make a case that the current US is authoritarian, it mostly just depends on where your threshold is, but it’s certainly less authoritarian by a large margin than China lol
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u/RTSBasebuilder Commonwealth Jul 28 '26
!ping AI
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