Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said on Monday that his company has "never advocated for a ban on open-weights models," an attempt to beat back criticism emerging across the tech industry that the AI lab is trying to exert excessive control over the future of artificial intelligence.
Amodei published his views in a blog post on Monday, after a coalition of tech companies, including Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta and Palantir, released a letter late last week urging policymakers to avoid "premature restrictions" on open-weight models, which users can download, modify and run on their own infrastructure. Chinese startups currently dominate the market, and some government officials have started to weigh whether those models should be banned or restricted in the U.S.
Anthropic is best known for developing a family of proprietary models called Claude that it sells to businesses. Chief rival OpenAI also primarily builds closed models, but the company signed on in support of the open-weight letter after it was published, while Anthropic did not.
"To summarize my and Anthropic's position, we have not and are not advocating for a ban on open-weights models as a category," Amodei wrote. "We should instead focus on keeping powerful chips out of authoritarian hands, stopping industrial-scale distillation, and requiring safety testing of all sufficiently capable models, open and closed."
