TL;DRAmodei says Anthropic has never called for banning open-weights models. He supports chip export controls, cracking down on distillation, and mandatory safety testing for all sufficiently capable models, open and closed.
Dario Amodei published Anthropic’s formal position on open-weights models on Sunday, breaking a silence that had drawn accusations that the company wanted to ban open-weight AI to protect its business. “Anthropic has never advocated for a ban on open-weights models,” Amodei wrote. “Open-weights models that don’t have dangerous capabilities are a public good.” The post came after Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and dozens of tech companies signed an open letter supporting open weights, and after US officials reportedly considered banning Chinese open-weights models.
Amodei outlined three measures he supports instead of a ban. First, enforcing chip export controls and cracking down on the “rampant smuggling” used to get advanced chips into China, because without US chips, scaling laws prevent China from training models more powerful than American ones. Second, stopping industrial-scale distillation operations that allow Chinese labs to build capable models far more cheaply than training from scratch. Third, mandatory safety testing for all sufficiently capable models, open and closed, regardless of country of origin, with less capable models from startups and academia exempted entirely.
