OpenAI and Anthropic Unite Against Chinese Open-Weight AI Models
OpenAI and Anthropic unite against open-weight AI risks to their bottom line
OpenAI and Anthropic, fierce competitors in the AI market, are aligning in Washington to warn policymakers about the risks of powerful Chinese open-weight models. While they argue that closed models are safer, critics fear this stance could lead to regulatory capture, entrenching large companies and stifling scientific progress. The debate centers on whether treating model distillation as IP theft will unfairly restrict independent research and the broader adoption of open AI tools.
As a researcher, I'm very worried if, for example, we get access cut off to all the Chinese models, adding that would be a big problem for doing research.
- andy99
I’m in a bubble so I may not see the big picture, but I feel like these guys are completely destroying any kind of credibility they had.
Anthropic especially has this arrogant, “we’re smarter than you”, communication style, and acts like they’re serving some higher purpose (to the point of absurdity in some cases like “model welfare”) - I think part of all this might be the EA roots but I’m not sure. But then they get a little competition and suddenly they’re a little tattle-tale running to the government looking to artificially preserve their advantage. I’ve seen nobody who doesn’t see the naked self interest. There’s no mission, not higher purpose, not even competitive spirit, just some people that were on top and can’t handle the idea that they weren’t as special as they thought. It’s going to bite them in the long run, we’ll probably get some politically motivated legislation, but the cats out of the bag, they’ve lost all credibility and don’t even have a uniquely competitive model anymore, they’ll end up as just another also-ran.
- abroszka33
There is nothing these big tech companies hate more than competition. It took Google, Apple and M$ long long time to establish their monopolies. OpenAI and Anthropic are trying to speed run it.
- wolttam
No way this can go wrong for the U.S. economy! Do everything you can to protect the existing incumbents, pay no mind to the wider consequences.
Winning strategy.
- iugtmkbdfil834
You know what? That is fine based merely on recent openai/hugginface incident ( after all, they needed open weights model to actually troubleshoot it, because 'safe' one did not let em ).
Let it all burn:D
edit:
And lets hope we learn a lesson.
- Havoc
This feels like the US is going to take a page from Europes book and regulate itself into uncompetitiveness
- nunez
To their mutual detriment. If anything, this proves how unsustainable of a business LLMs are in their current form.
This is a ultra speed run of what Red Hat and SuSE upending Windows in the 90s/00s.
LLMs are incredible and extremely useful, but they never should have been a for-profit venture. At least not at first. They should have originated from universities (who would have had the capital to fund model development and do so ethically in this universe), and LLMs should have been much, much smaller in scope (like autocorrect in word processors or autocomplete in IDEs). Instead, we (well, OpenAI mostly) opted to burn the Amazon to extract profit from the wood, our planet's future be damned.
Between this, transferring billions from EV R&D, eliminating the EV tax credit and targetting research universities, I can't help but think that Krebs was right. So MANY of the policy decisions being made by the US are inexplicable UNLESS you assume that a rootkit has infected the government.
- JumpCrisscross
“This is a point that bears repeating: because U.S. open weight model makers must follow the frontier labs’ terms of service, they (1) are worse than Chinese alternatives and (2) end up distilling the distillation, just with a detour through Chinese labs. Wouldn’t it be better if western open weight model makers could go to the source?
…
The U.S. should pass a law that (1) makes explicit that collecting data for training models is fair use, and (2) bars terms of service that forbid distillation, for U.S. companies at a minimum. Stopping distillation — which is literally just querying the API — is nearly impossible; the U.S. should go the other way and lean into a new copyright policy that both indemnifies the labs and also guarantees that what they learned fuels further innovation for everyone else” [1].
[1] https://stratechery.com/2026/whos-afraid-of-chinese-models/
- maxloh
It is ridiculous that OpenAI is a non-profit and Anthropic is a PBC, yet both actively resist open access to AI. This hinders human progress rather than serving it.
- throwa356262
"Why it matters: ...
The big picture: ...
Zoom in:...
Zoom out:..."
I wonder if they used an American or Chinese LLM to write this article?
- manoDev
It's inevitable. The value proposition of the software isn't large enough to justify (by itself) the valuation. Not to mention it's trained on lots of public or scraped data.
It's a gold rush, and the only guy getting rich will be the one selling the shovel (nvidia + cloud in this case).