An open letter to Dario: if you mean it, open the weights

Aurornis

This is incoherent. The argument seems to be that releasing the weights would slow the frontier labs from raising money, which would give them less money, which would slow progress on AI. It assumed all labs in the entire world agree to self-destruct this way and no new labs every start up to continue the work. No, really: > As you know, funding for frontier model development depends on valuations that assume the weights remain proprietary. By changing that assumption, we can reduce the money available for future training runs and slow progress at every lab at once, without a regulator deciding anything. Which doesn’t even follow. It depends on every lab in the world agreeing to self-destruct their valuations and stop competing. That’s a much more impossible ask than anything Dario is asking for. It also ignores the possibility of new labs starting up, using the open weights, and continuing exactly where the old labs left off. I feel like I just read the ramblings of someone who got so excited about the headline that they didn’t take the time to think if their argument was sound.

luqtas

> You seem like a good and principled person, and you have a record of giving things up for what you believe. i mean, 3 months ago i started to use AI for a project i'm working for around 6 years, full-time but calling a billionaire good and principled is a stretch and when you consider what made him rich, you sound like a 3 year-old kid trying persuade a mom or a dad to get lollipops when your are diabetic LLMs it's already a economical treat for various fields/people, which not only funnels powers to the elite even more, it does through by violating copyright... everyone who uses this technology is dirt (that includes me and my little dreams of hopefully creating a company which employs minorities on the tech field) but the amount of greed from people who own these servers/GPUs is beyond this world - the world isn't GPLv3 licensed yet, an ethical society wouldn't find excuses to provide and sell LLMs to the masses

t-o-m-e-k

I feel at this stage it has become a west vs east race of domination. I don’t see them slowing down in the foreseeable future.

sobiolite

Can we all play this game? An open letter to Dario: if you mean it, give me a billion dollars! Every time you, or any AI company releases a new frontier model, you have to give me a billion dollars. No strings attached. This will solve the danger of AI. Somehow.

ppeetteerr

CEOs are motivated by money and power. They will say anything to get either. If they truly wanted to slow down research, they would spend lobby money on the candidates who could enact laws. Instead, they are partnering with some of the most disliked companies (x, meta) to further their goals.

Handy-Man

What a dumb ask

sschueller

How about reading AGENTS.md... https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/6235

bryan0

Dario has been pretty clear and consistent that: 1. AI model safety is the most important thing. 2. open weights decreases model safety So it seems unlikely that this suggestion would be well-received

rvz

Anthropic will never open the weights, just like how no frontier lab will open up their training data.

wyager

The concept is stupid and the rule as stated is stupid. "Any AI model a company offers to the public has to be released as open weights." OK great, that means no models released to the public, complete concentration of power.

jrflo

1) there would be no incentive to develop a new model (non-distilled) if it had to be released as open weights. 2) frontier models are way more dangerous if they are open. It’s opening Pandora’s box, there’s no going back once they are released if they are too dangerous.

tristanj

The author put zero rational thought into this. If Anthropic is legally required to release the weights of any publicly accessible model, their logical response will just be to stop offering public models. Anthropic gets most of its revenue from enterprise agreements anyway. Providing public models or providing public access to their models is their secondary business. They can cut it off any time. Public access to their models (at subsidized rates) has caused so much indirect harm and financial cost to them that they're very well justified to stop providing access. Anthropic has already shown they're very comfortable with holding models from the public. Mythos has been around for what, six months, and there's never been a public release. Only the select few blessed by Anthropic have access. Forcing transparency on public models will just accelerate privatizing access to these models. You don't want to live in that world.

notcodingtoday

I refuse to believe this is not some sort of marketing piece for author's company. This is such a short-sighted take and author seems unaware of what damage can be done with powerful open weights models (intentional or not). Jail-broken Fable level LLMs can mean constant hacking leading to public desertification of the web (best case). Now imagine state sponsored bio lab leaking strange viruses on yearly basis. We've seen enough evidence already, it is difficult for me to imagine an engineer living at the centre of the change is writing this piece. It's a different question if you ask me if I trust a single company to police the technology. But with the current state of things, I unwillingly admit that no state entity can do a better job at the moment.

baby

This is a dumb argument. There are truly a few options, and I see at least two which are not discussed in the original post: banning the publishing of strong open weight models internationally, and nationalizing LLM companies. I’m not saying I’m for these solution, I’m probably against, but if we are being serious why are we not discussing these options?

jkahrs595

Completely delusional. Step #1 is asking them to give away their product for free and stop raising money. Might as well ask for them to pay their customers since we are just saying stupid shit.

throwaw12

I am very skeptical of those 3 faces of American AI labs: Dario, Sam and Elon Are they trying to stop everyone else from catching up with them or have they hit some kind of roadblock to improve models even further? But IMO, they're not trying to help humanity

jsnell

> Any AI model a company offers to the public has to be released as open weights. The obvious outcome of this plan would be frontier models not being released at all to public It'd be an amazingly bad outcome. Models accessible to the public would stagnate (no capital, no access to frontier model tokens to distill from), while internal models would keep improving at their previous pace, use them in-house, and eventually eat the whole economy.

MachineMan

"The meaning of ANTHROPIC is of or relating to human beings or the period of their existence on earth." Combine that with his end of humanity warning. The entire company is named after human extinction (a species he is not a part of). He is foreshadowing what he already knows to be true.

subhobroto

FUD is nothing new in our industry. The same playbook had been used, for eg. by Microsoft trying to fight Linux adoption and growth decades ago. This is the *exact* same playbook used to instill fear and scare people into regulating and setting up barriers to open weight and open source model adoption which these companies know put their amortization and margins at serious risk. The outcome of this game is well known and well understood by this point. This FUD, even if it succeeds, only slows down, not stop, open source adoption. Eventually, open source always wins because people want something that they can control and manage costs. Unless OpenAI, Anthropic, etc., will forever subsidize tokens, where it would never make sense for people, even after discounting 3rd Party/managed vs local/airgapped/self-host AI for risk, self-hosted AI, this FUD battle will eventually be lost, like it always has been. It is surprising to make this statement in late 2026, when OpenAI, Anthropic have not even IPO'd yet, and there is discussion in the streets that they'll IPO at trillions of dollars, something that is historically unthinkable, but history indicates otherwise: that in a decade or so, OpenAI and Anthropic are going to be footnotes in history and LLMs are going to be commodity with tokens selling all the way from unthinkably commodity to then-frontier intelligence prices. We will tell those generations fond stories of how computers with hungry NVIDIA GPUs that could run quality language models in 2026 cost a month or two worth of a dev's salary, while the then-current generation phones that fit into a pocket has way more compute capability, were already AI native and were cheap as chips.

nektro

releasing the weights would be reckless and borderline malpractice