Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei pushed back against industry criticism, insisting that his company has “never advocated for a ban on open-weights models”. The statement comes as tech leaders and former White House AI advisor David Sacks debate whether closed-model AI labs are attempting to restrict open-source technology under the guise of safety.Amodei’s comments have been published in a company blog post following an open letter released late last week by a coalition of major tech companies, including Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta and Palantir, urging policymakers to avoid placing “premature restrictions” on open-weight AI models. While chief rival OpenAI eventually added its support to the coalition’s letter, Anthropic declined to sign.
David Sacks predicted Anthropic’s messaging shift
The pushback from Amodei is exactly what Sacks posted two days ago (on July 26) with warnings that Anthropic will attempt to “kneecap open source” through targeted lobbying. Sacks said that Anthropic would attempt to reframe its regulatory push to avoid a public backlash while still restricting open-weight developments:“The entire tech industry (save for Anthropic) has come out in favor of open source AI. So what happens next? Will Anthropic change its lobbying efforts? Not likely. Now the gaslighting begins,” he said. Sacks wrote a bunch of points that Anthropic would say on the issue: “Nobody is trying to ban open source.”“We just want to limit who can use it.”“We just want to limit who can contribute to it.”“We just want to limit how powerful those models can be.”“We just want to make sure the guardrails (we lobbied for) can’t be removed.”He said that “The net effect will be the same. They won’t stop until they kneecap open source. The rest of the industry needs to watch these guys like a hawk.”
Anthropic outlines alternative guardrails
In his blog post, Amodei denied seeking a blanket ban on open-weight software, which allows users to download, modify and run models locally on their own infrastructure. Instead, he argued that national security and safety efforts should focus on hardware access, data scraping and rigorous pre-release evaluations:“To summarize my and Anthropic’s position, we have not and are not advocating for a ban on open-weights models as a category. We should instead focus on keeping powerful chips out of authoritarian hands, stopping industrial-scale distillation, and requiring safety testing of all sufficiently capable models, open and closed,” Amodei wrote.