[gruturo]

> Anthropic's position is not that, so the cynical nefarious purpose argument isn't even rhetorically true

Anthropic's position is precisely that, they're just not honest and transparent about it so they are trying to sabotage or delay open weight models in any way they can, direct or otherwise.

> If open-weight models keep being released near the frontier (or even worse, at the frontier), something bad will happen, and we'll have few tools to keep it from getting worse before it gets better. How bad is hard to lay a prediction on, it's perhaps lucky if it's something superficially bad that is a wake up call.

Calling bullshit. Current open weight models are already pretty close to the frontier - if not there - and the world still spins. Even small(er, relatively) models occasionally surprise everyone by being amazing at certain tasks. Furthermore, closed weight models can do plenty of damage which even their creators occasionally can't control - cue the Huggingface incident of last week and how they had to use GLM to defend themselves. Closed weight models will create a 2-class (or more) world in which some actors will have access others won't (see Mythos, or GPT5.6-Sol when a user has the right flags) and potentially carry out attacks against which the have-nots are... not supposed to be able to defend themselves? Fuck that.

[nedruod]

Ah, the position they don't state. So why respond to this press-release, which doesn't state that, since obviously it adds zero value? And why aren't the companies that signed the letter supporting open-weights, who have the same motivations, also lying? Since what they say isn't important, just what you say they say.

On your second point. Everything fine (so far), so nothing bad will happen. Except, you say something bad will happen, and has happened, with HuggingFace as the example.

You say that example shows closed weight models can't be controlled. But what happened there is OpenAI turned it off after their incompetently long discovery period. If it was an open-weight model, the clear next step would have been someone deciding to use it to pursue a goal, for example getting some money or creating some chaos, and there would have been no one to turn it off.

It's totally incompetent of OpenAI to have been unable to detect and disable in a shorter time period, but you know what's worse? You do know what's worse, right?

[gruturo]

> Ah, the position they don't state.

Come on, we're not _that_ stupid. Their alarmist tones are the height of hypocrisy when they do release powerful models after spelling doom. Their safeguards and guardrails have been broken countless times - let's see if _this_ time the jailbreak detection in J-space actually puts a stop to them. But - really - they have trillions at stake, which evaporate once their edge is commoditized and inference providers have a near-equivalent product for much less. They're firing on all PR and lobbying cylinders to delay that just enough for their IPO to succeed, and leave investors holding the bag - I'd be terrified of their inclusion in tons of pension funds which track S&P500 or whatever they'll end up with (SpaceX, should the actual floating shares increase, and OpenAI worry me just as much).

On my second point: it happened, it keeps happening, it will keep happening all the time, and it's not new. Incredibly bright individual researchers, dodgy companies and state actors discovered, weaponized and traded vulns for, I don't know, 15 years before LLMs got involved? And it's not like they are out of a job now. The multiplier effect is not lost on me, but the fallout from even Mythos so far has been.... not that much, really? And I'm not completely ignorant there - I am security-adjacent and have close colleagues who specialize in that.

Also, indeed I know that a powerful open weight model in malicious hands is worse than OpenAI doing a whoopsie and cutting access off once they eventually realize it. But even a closed weight frontier model served by a non-US aligned entity could serve the purpose - and while I'm thinking of China, I do wonder what Russia may do - they used to be really good at this stuff and their leaders are not exactly the friendliest bunch around. Or India, or Iran, I hear they're a bit angry lately. Unlikely but let's say they develop or acquire the capability (ultimately it's some hardware + one leak away even for closed models). Asking them politely to stop may not be effective. Western society may pay the price of applying the brake and find itself out...modeled? is that a word? Because 2 guys called Sam and Dario, and their early investors, really want those returns? Come on we're not discussing the greater good here - it's a bunch of greedy guys trying to pull the ladder up after themselves. You do realize that, right?

Do we really owe them a moat?

[nedruod]

If you think I've insinuated they don't have a motivation, you've misread. It's undeniable they have motivations (though I pointed out, the signatories and non-signatories all have the same motivations). From a PR perspective, the motivation would push toward being a signatory.

My overall point is, don't let their motivations, nor your cynical conclusions based on those obvious motivations, blind you to your own point of view.

The debate here shouldn't be about the signatories motivations, it should be about the risks of open-weights coming too close to the untested frontier. You've acknowledged that now: "I know that a powerful open weight model in malicious hands is worse than OpenAI doing a whoopsie".

But I'm left a little confused about your position because you follow that up with what I can only describe as a set of "what-about"-isms. Yes, closed models could still be misused, especially in the wrong hands. Still, even worst case there, it's fewer hands. China is the only set of hands that's really relevant for now, no one else is close.

Without going into deep detail, fairly sure we both don't trust the Chinese government. But we also don't have a lot of practical choice on whether they have access to a model frontier-ish. What could be different is if Russian hackers, Malaysian hackers, Iranian hackers, etc. all have access too. In the open-weight model, they sort of do (somewhat constrained by compute.. but rounding up enough compute for a bit of inference is achievable even for them).

I should make it clear at this point that I think banning US companies from using open-weight models would be a totally ineffective policy that's just self-harm. Anthropic said the same and I agreed, but just in case that stance has become blurred, I'll re-clarify. It's probably more unclear because there really isn't a policy stance on the table that backs what the "maybe there shouldn't be frontier open-weight models", because any real and effective policy there would either have to be multi-lateral, or be the result of independent actions that just happens to align. So really, all that an independent actor like Anthropic can do is say "maybe there shouldn't be frontier open-weight models", which they did and see if that leads the world toward agreeing with that position, which might then lead to some action.

If that somewhat tenuous outcome ever did occur, it wouldn't really mean a "moat", as the Moonshot, Zhipu, Alibaba, Bytedance would still have a model and offer it via API. And they could still create agreements with US/EU/etc. cloud companies to host them, in the same way as other closed-models are hosted. But there'd be more control.

Yeah, there'd be some advantages to model providers, compute providers from this. There'd be some costs to potential customers and those that would self-deploy for good purposes. As little as I support those costs, and as much as I'd prefer not to hand out those advantages, my cynicism would not prevent me from realizing that it's a bigger problem that if you don't do this, you'll fail to harm the interests of those who would self-deploy for nefarious purposes.

[gruturo]

> My overall point is, don't let their motivations, nor your cynical conclusions based on those obvious motivations, blind you to your own point of view.

Very fair point, taken. So, setting aside Anthropic & Co's motivations: trying to restrict this is pointless without planetwide cooperation - I don't see China complying - and likely to just result in dividing people into haves and have-nots. Furthermore, allowing this access, nay, power, into the hands of the very crappy stewards around at the moment doesn't really protect anyone, just makes them richer. I'd stomach their endless lust for more money if it was just a side effect of making the world secure, but I don't see that happening either. What do you realistically do when China keeps advancing the SOTA? And really, all the other nations I mentioned - they're one leak (and a few H200s) away from acquiring the ability anyway. They don't need the ability to serve 250 million concurrent users to be dangerous, just a handful of instances in the hands of their government officers. Who are we withholding the knowledge from, at that point? For what benefit?

I won't even touch the point that this is.... ultimately, knowledge acquired by scraping the internet, so it should belong to everyone - and now they're even pissed off someone is "stealing it back" by distillation - nice discussion for another time.

Furthermore - this approach worked for nuclear weapons for a while as the material is really hard to source, supercomputers weren't available, centrifuges are hard, and good nuclear scientists were so few that they could be individually monitored or assassinated if they helped the wrong party (really). Fast forward to present day when there's no practical way to prevent NK or Iran from advancing their knowledge. We're trying the same obsolete approach, but it applies even less thanks to the Internet. Also, even then, a couple leaks in the 50s gave the soviet union parity - any parallels to our scenario?

I really appreciate your points, I agree with the danger, but I don't see any approach really fixing the situation, and those guys' proposal is just a get even richer quick scheme.

Finally, of all people, finally a day came where I find myself in full agreement with Zuck (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/28/technology/mark-zuckerber...). Obviously his motivation is also not lost on me - this is bad only because it's not him this time, but still, even a (morally) broken Zuck is occasionally right.

[nedruod]

The China point cuts both ways though. The main point from that would be that everyone's opinions are irrelevant. No point in supporting open-weight, because China is going to do what China is going to do. No point in supporting less open-weight, because ---same reason---.

Yes, that can make the whole debate pointless. But seems like in that situation, might as well just speak your mind freely. Maybe things with China aren't as hopeless as you make out. I have a much less firm opinion on what China will do. They (meaning Xi) might unilaterally decide they don't like open-weights, and they'd just roll out that new policy. They might decide to keep releasing them.

They might decide to negotiate something. Honestly I agree, the first two are the most likely options. Not just because China govt isn't much for negotiating here, but neither is the US either. The combination leads to low probability.

The cynic in me says, there really isn't any point in writing anything, other than for PR reasons then. And given that the support open-weight models version plays better for PR reasons, if I'm going to believe one group is doing this for PR reasons, the case is worst for Anthropic's version. It doesn't get them a ban, it doesn't get a change in China policy. It just pisses off people who react on vibes.

The optimist says, might as well write something you support, because even if change is unlikely, the writing is more likely to accomplish something than do harm.