Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has argued that policymakers should keep lower-risk open-weight AI accessible while placing stricter safeguards around frontier systems, including mandatory testing and limits on China’s access to advanced computing and model capabilities.
In a post outlining Anthropic’s position, Amodei said broad restrictions, including bans on Chinese open-weight models used by US businesses, would not address his main national security concerns. Instead, he pointed to the possibility of authoritarian governments surpassing the US in advanced AI, as well as cyber, biological, and alignment risks posed by increasingly capable systems.
Amodei also called for action against industrial-scale model distillation, which he said allows Chinese developers to improve their models with less computing power than would be needed to train comparable systems from scratch.
The statement followed criticism of Anthropic for not signing an industry letter backed by Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta, IBM, Mistral, Hugging Face and other technology companies urging policymakers to avoid premature restrictions on open-weight models.
The letter said that open weights could broaden access to AI, intensify competition, and enable organizations to adapt and deploy models without relying on a single provider. Amodei agreed with parts of that case but disputed claims that openness inherently improves safety research or gives defenders an advantage over attackers.
