Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said he has “never advocated” banning open-weight AI models, pushing back against claims that the company wants to protect its closed-model business from open-source competition.
Amodei, in a blog post on Monday, said AI models without dangerous capabilities are “a public good,” arguing that banning Chinese open-source models would do little to address real risks because “bad actors are unlikely to be legitimate U.S. businesses.”
He acknowledged that a ban could protect U.S. AI companies such as Anthropic from competition, but said that was never his objective. Instead of supporting a ban, Amodei proposed three more targeted policy measures.
Firstly, stricter restrictions on exports of advanced chips and chipmaking equipment to authoritarian governments, including the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). It contended that China’s limited domestic chip production prevents it from developing AI models more powerful than those of the U.S. without access to American chips, making export controls the most effective way to curb the perceived threat.
Secondly, a crackdown on AI companies training models using outputs generated or “industrial-scale distillation” by more advanced AI systems. Thirdly, mandatory safety testing for all sufficiently capable AI models, regardless of whether they are open- or closed-source.
