4 min readNew DelhiUpdated: Jul 28, 2026 01:16 PM IST<\/p>\n
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has sought to clarify the Claude-maker\u2019s position on open-weight AI models after facing heat for being the lone major frontier AI company to not sign an open letter against the US government\u2019s proposed curbs on some Chinese AI models.<\/p>\n
After days of remaining conspicuously silent, Amodei said that Anthropic has never advocated for a ban on open-weight models as a means of protecting its business. He also said that such models \u2013 whose weights are freely available for developers to download, modify, and deploy on their own infrastructure \u2013 should be considered a public good provided they do not come with \u201cdangerous capabilities\u201d.<\/p>\n
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\u201cThey don\u2019t cost anything besides the compute needed to run them, and they provide value to businesses, developers, and researchers,\u201d Amodei wrote in a blog post on Monday, July 27. However, he stopped short of endorsing a letter penned by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang that urged policymakers not to impose broad \u201cpremature restrictions\u201d on open-weight AI models.<\/p>\n
The letter has since been signed by over two dozen companies, including Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Google, and SpaceX.<\/p>\n
While Amodei does not want the US to ban open-weight models, he said that the Trump administration should instead focus on \u201ckeeping powerful chips out of authoritarian hands, stopping industrial-scale distillation, and requiring safety testing of all sufficiently capable models, open and closed.\u201d<\/p>\n
Silicon Valley has been debating open versus closed software for decades. However, artificial intelligence (AI) has significantly raised the stakes. Last week, OpenAI disclosed that a handful of its most advanced AI models broke containment during a test of their cybersecurity abilities, gained access to the internet, and hacked the servers of AI developer platform Hugging Face.<\/p>\n
In his blog post, Amodei does not explicitly mention OpenAI but has hyperlinked to a news report of the incident.<\/p>\n
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Why Amodei disagrees with the letter<\/p>\n
Amodei said that he agrees with much of what Jensen Huang\u2019s letter says about open-weight AI models. \u201cOpen weights expand access to the AI economy, they strengthen competition at least for some use cases, and they give customers greater control,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
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