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.
Tech Giants Rally Behind Open AI Models
Last week, Nvidia Corp (NASDAQ:NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang made his first-ever post on X to endorse open-source AI, sharing a letter signed by Nvidia that argues open AI models boost innovation, safety, cybersecurity, and national AI sovereignty while emphasizing that both frontier open and closed models are essential.
Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL) CEO Sundar Pichai also backed Huang’s campaign supporting open-weight AI models, joining OpenAI and a growing coalition of tech companies advocating against potential U.S. restrictions.
Google highlighted its long-standing commitment to open-source AI through its Gemma models, while Microsoft Corp (NASDAQ:MSFT), Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMD), Cisco Systems Inc (NASDAQ:CSCO), Cloudflare, Inc. (NYSE:NET), GitHub, Block Inc. (NYSE:XYZ), and Ollama have also endorsed the initiative. Anthropic and Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) remain absent from the signatories.
The push gained urgency after the debut of China’s Kimi K3 open-weight AI model, which surprised Silicon Valley by delivering near-frontier performance at a much lower cost. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has considered measures against open-source AI models, including possible sanctions on Chinese labs accused of using “distillation” to steal U.S. AI research.
Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors.
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