5 ms·
An open letter to Dario: if you mean it, open the weights
- MintyPyro 19d agoIf you think the technology you're developing is extremely dangerous, release it to the public
- Aurornis 19d agoThis is incoherent. The argument seems to be that releasing the weights would slow the frontier labs from raising money, which would give them less money, which would slow progress on AI. It assumed all labs in the entire world agree to self-destruct this way and no new labs every start up to continue the work. No, really: > As you know, funding for frontier model development depends on valuations that assume the weights remain proprietary. By changing that assumption, we can reduce the money available for future training runs and slow progress at every lab at once, without a regulator deciding anything. Which doesn’t even follow. It depends on every lab in the world agreeing to self-destruct their valuations and stop competing. That’s a much more impossible ask than anything Dario is asking for. It also ignores the possibility of new labs starting up, using the open weights, and continuing exactly where the old labs left off. I feel like I just read the ramblings of someone who got so excited about the headline that they didn’t take the time to think if their argument was sound.
- EA-3167 19d agoIt follows if the goal is to deflate the bubble without popping it, and if the reality under the hood supports the absurd investment. The companies themselves wouldn't do it, but they could be required to if they want to operate in the US.
- Aurornis 19d ago> It follows if the goal is to deflate the bubble without popping it, The conversation was about AI safety, monitoring, and regulations, not bubbles. Forcing the weights to be opened to the world accomplishes the opposite of all of that. The argument is incoherent. Or this author doesn’t understand the topic at all? > The companies themselves wouldn't do it, but they could be required to if they want to operate in the US. What makes you think the companies outside of the US wouldn’t just thank the US companies for their open weights and then continue on without any of the regulations but all of the advantages?
- deleted 19d ago[deleted]
- jacobgold 19d ago> Forcing the weights to be opened to the world accomplishes the opposite of all of that. The argument is incoherent. Or this author doesn’t understand the topic at all? Or maybe you understand less than you think? Frontier progress is limited by compute, and compute is bought with investor money. Investors fund labs at hundreds of billions because they expect exclusive ownership of the model weights. If the weights are public the day a model ships, the valuations drop, the funding rounds shrink, and the next training run is smaller or later. Make sense?
- Aurornis 19d agoYour whole argument seems to rest on the idea that the AI race is entirely contained within the United States, where we can regulate them. And that no other country might just take the open weights and continue right on with the advancements in private?
- luqtas 19d ago> You seem like a good and principled person, and you have a record of giving things up for what you believe. i mean, 3 months ago i started to use AI for a project i'm working for around 6 years, full-time but calling a billionaire good and principled is a stretch and when you consider what made him rich, you sound like a 3 year-old kid trying persuade a mom or a dad to get lollipops when your are diabetic LLMs it's already a economical treat for various fields/people, which not only funnels powers to the elite even more, it does through by violating copyright... everyone who uses this technology is dirt (that includes me and my little dreams of hopefully creating a company which employs minorities on the tech field) but the amount of greed from people who own these servers/GPUs is beyond this world - the world isn't GPLv3 licensed yet, an ethical society wouldn't find excuses to provide and sell LLMs to the masses
- t-o-m-e-k 19d agoI feel at this stage it has become a west vs east race of domination. I don’t see them slowing down in the foreseeable future.
- sobiolite 19d agoCan we all play this game? An open letter to Dario: if you mean it, give me a billion dollars! Every time you, or any AI company releases a new frontier model, you have to give me a billion dollars. No strings attached. This will solve the danger of AI. Somehow.
- poincareball 19d ago[dead]
- sschueller 19d agoHow about reading AGENTS.md... https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/6235 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/6235
- ppeetteerr 19d agoCEOs are motivated by money and power. They will say anything to get either. If they truly wanted to slow down research, they would spend lobby money on the candidates who could enact laws. Instead, they are partnering with some of the most disliked companies (x, meta) to further their goals.
- ianm218 19d agoAnthropic supported Alex bores who was one of the most AI safety pilled politicians https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/24/big-tech-new-york-alex-bores-ai-spending https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/24/big-tech-new...
- ppeetteerr 19d agoGood. Keep spending. Keep advocating.
- Handy-Man 19d agoWhat a dumb ask
- bryan0 19d agoDario has been pretty clear and consistent that: 1. AI model safety is the most important thing. 2. open weights decreases model safety So it seems unlikely that this suggestion would be well-received
- MarcelOlsz 19d agoIt's blatant regulatory capture.
- rvz 19d agoAnthropic will never open the weights, just like how no frontier lab will open up their training data.
- wyager 19d agoThe concept is stupid and the rule as stated is stupid. "Any AI model a company offers to the public has to be released as open weights." OK great, that means no models released to the public, complete concentration of power.
- alxndr13 19d agoif they do not release any model to the public: how would they make money then? Their entire funding model depends on that they generate much revenue _soon_
- wyager 19d ago> how would they make money then? By acquiring companies and letting the now-internal employees use AI, easily outcompeting any company they didn't acquire
- jacobgold 19d agoIt's somewhat doubtful but even if they did, that'd be much slower progress, achieving the goal.
- quikoa 19d ago> easily outcompeting any company If it were easy they'd be doing that instead.
- wyager 19d agoEveryone is "doing that instead". Every successful company in every industry is heavily using AI at this point. If that were illegal, the next best option would be AI labs acquiring the companies instead of just selling them tokens.
- nijave 19d agoEnterprise contracts
- jrflo 19d ago1) there would be no incentive to develop a new model (non-distilled) if it had to be released as open weights. 2) frontier models are way more dangerous if they are open. It’s opening Pandora’s box, there’s no going back once they are released if they are too dangerous.
- tristanj 19d agoThe author put zero rational thought into this. If Anthropic is legally required to release the weights of any publicly accessible model, their logical response will just be to stop offering public models. Anthropic gets most of its revenue from enterprise agreements anyway. Providing public models or providing public access to their models is their secondary business. They can cut it off any time. Public access to their models (at subsidized rates) has caused so much indirect harm and financial cost to them that they're very well justified to stop providing access. Anthropic has already shown they're very comfortable with holding models from the public. Mythos has been around for what, six months, and there's never been a public release. Only the select few blessed by Anthropic have access. Forcing transparency on public models will just accelerate privatizing access to these models. You don't want to live in that world.
- jacobgold 19d ago> ...their logical response will just be to stop offering public models. Anthropic gets most of its revenue from enterprise agreements anyway. Enterprises are part of the public in this context, so that's not a loophole which would exist.
- vlovich123 19d agoWhile mostly true, don’t discount people looking for work that offers them familiar tools. The cheap public pans are a way to train a labor force + create upward demand from people trained on those tools to influence big corporate purchase agreements. Remove that and your lucrative corporate business today starts to struggle in ~5 years, especially given how largely fungible the models and harnesses are.
- bugufu8f83 19d ago>The author put zero rational thought into this. If Anthropic is legally required to release the weights of any publicly accessible model, their logical response will just be to stop offering public models. I mean... that's the entire point of their argument, yes. >Anthropic gets most of its revenue from enterprise agreements anyway. Providing public models or providing public access to their models is their secondary business. Enterprise agreements are public access.
- deleted 19d ago[deleted]
- notcodingtoday 19d agoI refuse to believe this is not some sort of marketing piece for author's company. This is such a short-sighted take and author seems unaware of what damage can be done with powerful open weights models (intentional or not). Jail-broken Fable level LLMs can mean constant hacking leading to public desertification of the web (best case). Now imagine state sponsored bio lab leaking strange viruses on yearly basis. We've seen enough evidence already, it is difficult for me to imagine an engineer living at the centre of the change is writing this piece. It's a different question if you ask me if I trust a single company to police the technology. But with the current state of things, I unwillingly admit that no state entity can do a better job at the moment.
- Marha01 19d ago> Jail-broken Fable level LLMs can mean constant hacking leading to public desertification of the web (best case). A jailbroken model that can hack a website can also easily fix the vulnerability that allowed it to hack it. There is a limited number of such vulnerabilities. Over time, all vulnerabilities that are discoverable by the model would be patched and status quo would be restored (until a more powerful model is released: rinse and repeat).
- notcodingtoday 19d agoHence, the best case. Yet, the damage is permanent. Your favourite trail walking app patching things after the attack does not undo your location getting leaked. In your scenario, during the disruptive phase, I can imagine apps advertising 'we have Mythos backed security company defending our data'. Reminiscent of showing how much your gun is bigger than your neighbour or gangs on the street, it's truly distopian.
- ascorbic 19d agoAnd in the meantime, every site in the world gets hacked. It takes far longer to fix every vulnerability than it does to find one unpatched one. Mythos has led to huge numbers of reported vulnerabilities on every kind of software. If those were all dropped as zero days (which is effectively what an open weight model would do), attackers can choose an unpatched on at their leisure while defenders race to fix them all and update everything.
- baby 19d agoThis is a dumb argument. There are truly a few options, and I see at least two which are not discussed in the original post: banning the publishing of strong open weight models internationally, and nationalizing LLM companies. I’m not saying I’m for these solution, I’m probably against, but if we are being serious why are we not discussing these options?
- jkahrs595 19d agoCompletely delusional. Step #1 is asking them to give away their product for free and stop raising money. Might as well ask for them to pay their customers since we are just saying stupid shit.
- throwaw12 19d agoI am very skeptical of those 3 faces of American AI labs: Dario, Sam and Elon Are they trying to stop everyone else from catching up with them or have they hit some kind of roadblock to improve models even further? But IMO, they're not trying to help humanity
- olelele 19d agoAnyone involved in burning that much energy at the same time as a large part of the planet will cook soon due to energy expenditure is definitely not helping humanity. It’s marketing & empire building all the way down..
- spiderice 19d ago> soon Always soon. But soon never seems to come. I'm sure we'll all be cooked any day now.
- deleted 19d ago[deleted]
- deleted 19d ago[deleted]
- jsnell 19d ago> Any AI model a company offers to the public has to be released as open weights. The obvious outcome of this plan would be frontier models not being released at all to public It'd be an amazingly bad outcome. Models accessible to the public would stagnate (no capital, no access to frontier model tokens to distill from), while internal models would keep improving at their previous pace, use them in-house, and eventually eat the whole economy.
- jacobgold 19d agoThat's a legitimate possibility but it's also much slower, more risky, and harder to raise money for than what they're doing now.
- quikoa 19d agoIf Anthropic/OpenAI would've shown incredible results using these models then I'd be worried about this. Instead we get Codex and Claude Code, bloated and disappointing software. I'm sorry but "use them in-house, and eventually eat the whole economy." doesn't appear to be a real concern with these two companies.
- MachineMan 19d ago"The meaning of ANTHROPIC is of or relating to human beings or the period of their existence on earth." Combine that with his end of humanity warning. The entire company is named after human extinction (a species he is not a part of). He is foreshadowing what he already knows to be true.
- subhobroto 19d agoFUD is nothing new in our industry. The same playbook had been used, for eg. by Microsoft trying to fight Linux adoption and growth decades ago. This is the *exact* same playbook used to instill fear and scare people into regulating and setting up barriers to open weight and open source model adoption which these companies know put their amortization and margins at serious risk. The outcome of this game is well known and well understood by this point. This FUD, even if it succeeds, only slows down, not stop, open source adoption. Eventually, open source always wins because people want something that they can control and manage costs. Unless OpenAI, Anthropic, etc., will forever subsidize tokens, where it would never make sense for people, even after discounting 3rd Party/managed vs local/airgapped/self-host AI for risk, self-hosted AI, this FUD battle will eventually be lost, like it always has been. It is surprising to make this statement in late 2026, when OpenAI, Anthropic have not even IPO'd yet, and there is discussion in the streets that they'll IPO at trillions of dollars, something that is historically unthinkable, but history indicates otherwise: that in a decade or so, OpenAI and Anthropic are going to be footnotes in history and LLMs are going to be commodity with tokens selling all the way from unthinkably commodity to then-frontier intelligence prices. We will tell those generations fond stories of how computers with hungry NVIDIA GPUs that could run quality language models in 2026 cost a month or two worth of a dev's salary, while the then-current generation phones that fit into a pocket has way more compute capability, were already AI native and were cheap as chips.
- nektro 19d agoreleasing the weights would be reckless and borderline malpractice
- sgammon 19d agoReleasing the weights for a 1T+ parameter model doesn't really help "the little guy" when it costs ~$50K per H200 and 8 of them aren't enough to run a single node. Somehow this plan manages to lean into every single bad outcome
- andai 19d agoI think the main argument was "intentionally commit economic suicide to slow the development of dangerous AI." (That being said, Chinese labs are releasing weights, so I'm not sure how the economics actually work.)
- sgammon 19d ago> The big companies can afford the compliance teams and lawyers to keep up, and each new requirement makes it harder for anyone else to catch them It also takes a lot to do anything with a 1T+ parameter model. Arguably there is still an immense capital moat. So I'm not sure it would even have the effect the author intends.
- nijave 19d agoProviders can compete on cost which is a small but positive outcome. It also encourages providers to find more efficient ways to serve models which also lowers cost. That said, these frontier models are still astronomically huge.
- m3kw9 19d agoThey are going for IPO, don't be naive
- oleganza 19d agoSo much communism is being unleashed lately on the news. First amendment provides for freedom from coerced speech. Also: releasing just the weights is like releasing some source code without makefiles or configuration scripts. Sounds half-baked. PS. The real problem with concentration of mega-models is the same old problem of temporary monopolies in emergent markets (IBM in 80s, Microsoft in 90s, Google Search in 2000s). Let's not worry too much about other peoples' money and use the amazing tools we have to solve our problems today.
- sarjann 19d agoNot sure if I missed something but not sure what justification he gave that Open Weights would improve safety. The counter argument from Anthropic is easy. If we open weights we can't detact it after being published / the guard rails that run on top of the models would be lost. Also abliteration would be much easier to do when a model's been publically release. I'm not a fan of Anthropic but the argument in the article seems stupid.
- astrostl 19d ago"If you're so worried about acceleration, why don't you accelerationmaxx?" — OP
- aarondong 19d agoThis made me do a triple take. Here is the proposed logic as I follow it: > AI models are dangerous. They can help bad people do dangerous things. They may be capable of autonomously executing dangerous things. They may cause unwanted effects on the labour market. > More capable AI models are more dangerous, but require more money to train. > Money requires investors with expectations that the model will generate a profit over its operational lifetime. > The operational lifetime value of a model is decreased if every model is public and can be hosted on any infrastructure. > If investors see less operational lifetime value from model companies, model companies receive less capital and therefore train more capable models at a slower rate. Follow-ons: There are immediate risks in releasing capable cyber models that can be ablated and then launch cyberattacks. Concentration of power moves immediately into the infrastructure layer for inference. Models will be kept private for longer, if not indefinitely, given there is less incentive to release them publicly. Enforcement globally will occur because accessing the lucrative US market means using an open source model. The entire argument hinges on strict enforcement of this policy, when AI model routing can already be opaque. It also hinges on investors being rational and expecting free cash flow from AI companies, rather than reaching a criticality threshold of model capability for recursive self-improvement internally and parlaying that into a global mega-corporation. New labs and companies without infrastructure connections will no longer be able to raise money, given investor expectations, and therefore not be able to increment AI progress. So a win for the infrastructure layer, models being kept private for longer, new labs being unable to compete, immediate risks in the rollout (I suppose could be mitigated by a staged rollout i.e. policy active in 2030, pricing effects now), enforcement being tricky, and in the event that foreign competitors lead the AI frontier and then start closing models, just conceding the market to them if US consumers and companies find workarounds to pay for foreign AI.
- dumberquestions 19d agoAs much as I would love to be able to download Fable or Astra, this doesn't sound very convincing. If I were Dario I would've argued that slowing down without sharing weights is already possible without the disadvantages of sharing weights such as losing commercial incentives and potentially giving rogue actors unmonitored access to powerful models.
- itkovian_ 19d agoThe author is trying to make the point that there are courses of action available to Dario that would achieve his stated goals but would result in Anthropic having very little impact, control or influence. And that because he’s not doing those things, his motivations extend beyond the stated goals. It’s a good point and not exactly made subtly but seems completely lost on most comments here.
- hashstring 19d agoI think both presented plans are suboptimal. However, Dario’s plan is BY FAR the least compelling and non-sensical. I think a constructive discussion should identify issues with current proposals so that we can instead develop something valuable. Dario’s plan is bad because: 1. It’s blatant window-dressing to monopolize and concentrate power in a field in which, currently, no company has established moat and there is no practical path to create that. Anthropic knows that and doesn’t like that. That is exactly what his incentives are and proposals from him should be viewed through this lens. Just like how SHELL has a clear conflict of interest with progressive proposals on CLIMATE POLICY. 2. It clearly is ineffective in achieving the presented goal of ‘moral alignment’. Chinese labs are open weighting and are 3-6 months behind US labs. What levers does the US currently have to align on this? The answer should be in international diplomacy, but given that Jared Kushner was the US delegate sent to talk about NUCLEAR issues in Iran, one should draw the conclusion that this lever is broken. Any meaningful repair work (which is non-trivial and will take a long time anyway), cannot even start within 2 years. 3. Anthropic is and has long been working with the Department of War on killing machines. Their machines were and are being used in the US war with Iran. This is only shocking to people that read about their news stunt that made Anthropic seem so distinguished. This is what exalted Dario to become the pop-posterboy of an “ethical AI” company. Objectively, guidance based on his moral compass should be challenged and this media campaign should not cloud that. Again, this relates to the earlier point I made that Dario’s for-profit company incentives being fundamentally misaligned with the public interest. 4. Your government, the United States, is authoritarian and that is the biggest threat to any altruistic “moral alignment” endeavours happening there. Yet, Dario misidentified the state of the system that his company exists and operates within when he wrote: > “The US and other democratic governments attempt to coordinate with authoritarian governments” A valuable discussion can start when “the US and other” is moved to the part after “coordinate with”.
- killmill 17d ago[dead]