In brief
Andy Konwinski, who cofounded Databricks and Perplexity AI, argued this week that concentrating AI power is a safety risk in itself.
The essay followed Open Frontier, a working meeting of roughly 100 researchers in San Francisco on June 30.
Turing Award winner Yann LeCun replied directly on X, comparing today's closed-lab AI moment to "medieval obscurantism akin to the Ottoman empire banning the use of the printing press for 200 years."
Perplexity AI and Databricks co-founder Andy Konwinski thinks the AI safety conversation has a problem: It's being used to concentrate power, not prevent harm. Earlier this week, he published an essay making his case, with Anthropic as the star witness.The case he builds starts with a decision Anthropic reversed in 48 hours. When Anthropic launched Claude Fable 5 on June 9, a paragraph buried in its 319-page system card disclosed that the model would silently degrade its own responses for anyone it suspected of training a competing AI.Researchers found it. The internet did not take it well.Anthropic walked it back, but for Konwinski this makes no difference when analyzing the bigger picture. "The problem isn't that Anthropic made a bad decision," he wrote. "The problem is that they assumed the decision was theirs to make."His essay, titled "Concentration of power in AI is a risk, not a solution," followed Open Frontier, a working meeting he convened through his nonprofit Laude Institute at San Francisco's Exploratorium on June 30. About 100 researchers showed up.UC Berkeley dean Jennifer Chayes, who runs the College of Computing, Data Science, and Society, told a funding panel that Berkeley researchers are "all building on Chinese models because we don't have a Western open frontier model"—and that the safety messaging from OpenAI and Anthropic ahead of their IPOs amounted to a "very effective fear campaign."Konwinski's argument is that centralizing access doesn't neutralize risk; it creates a different one. AI is foundational infrastructure—in the same category as railroads, electricity, and the internet. Those technologies reorganized society around whoever controlled the underlying layer. The same is coming for AI. His alternative: a research commons with frontier-scale compute that lets top researchers reach the frontier without needing permission from a private lab to do it.LeCun: It's the Ottoman empire banning the printing pressYann LeCun, Meta’s former chief scientist, replied to Konwinski's essay on X with no ambiguity. "I've been disseminating a similar message for years,” he replied on Konwinski’s post. “The concentration of power in AI and the desire for control is by far the biggest danger of AI."
