OpenAI and Anthropic unite against open-weight AI risks to their bottom line

https://www.axios.com/2026/07/22/openai-anthropic-open-models-trump-china

by yogthos • 5 hours ago

254 285 5 hours ago

axios.com

Havoc• 5 hours ago

This feels like the US is going to take a page from Europes book and regulate itself into uncompetitiveness

close04• 5 hours ago

Except without any of the benefits of regulation to its citizens.

testfrequency• 5 hours ago

Exactly.

Europe regulates to protect humanity.

USA regulates to protect monopolies and political power

embedding-shape6• 5 hours ago

The point of regulation in Europe is usually to protect people. Regulation in the US seems to be done with the purpose of protection companies. I'm not 100% sure, but this feels non-ideal for most people.

Sharlin• 5 hours ago

To take the point further, the US still protects people. It's just that the people tend to exclusively inhabit the top 0.1% or 0.01% quantiles.

baxtr2• 5 hours ago

You mean like Chat Control 2.0, by which ordinary people are targeted and politicians are exempt?

nradov2• 4 hours ago

Please explain how making it difficult to start a business and hire employees protects people. I've never understood that logic but maybe I'm missing something.

watwut• 5 hours ago

The winning monopolies and CEOs seem to be intent into turning into some kind of techno fascists feudalism with the most corrupt government on earth, uncontrollable start the war machine and increasingly less and generally destroying democracy.

So, I am not sure it is such a win. These guys seem to be winning.

Fricken• 4 hours ago

Europe wins by knowing better than to play those games.

wolttam2• 5 hours ago

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.

embedding-shape6• 5 hours ago

Clearly worked for Oracle and Intel, who are still making their executives rich. What do you mean "average person", who gives a fuck about those?

telep-io• 5 hours ago

Doesn't help how the us gov is saying Kimi 3 stole IP of Fable even though it's not possible to distill Fable in 1 month.

echelon5• 5 hours ago

That's wild. It was only 15 days. It would have been impossible to gather enough data AND clean it up AND train AND do post training in just 15 days.

edit: the Anthropic employee downvotes are coming in now. This was +8, now it's +3.

Someone1234• 4 hours ago

And they've provided no technical explanation of how...

This may be an odd reference, but I remember this song and dance with Roomba Vs. Roborock. "Roborock stole our IP!!!" but the problem was that song was slightly believable in the very early days, then Roborock started releasing products far better than anything Roomba had, but the tune in the US never changed. Literally for years after Roborock's products were two generations better than Roomba, but somehow they "stole" that?

China has money, talent, and cheap electricity/superior infrastructure. The US's big AI built their products on stolen copyright material and social media scraping. China likely got a catchup boost via distilling, but recently a lot of their AI ventures have come fully online, and they've just throwing tons of compute/power at the problem, and we're starting to see legitimately competitive products without shortcuts/cheating.

But the US won't change its tune; and that's convenient because they don't really want to compete, but rather roll out protectionism and fear per normal.

chlee• 4 hours ago

the rumor in chinese web is the following.

Z.ai found a way to crack/overcome the cryptography that safeguarded Claude/Fable's thinking tokens in Claude Code, so Z.ai had the ability to peak into decrypted thinking tokens that Fable produced in Claude Code. Z.ai also shared their findings with other big LLM companies like Moonshot AI, which had 20,000+ accounts speed running through Fable to get their hands on as many high quality thinking tokens as possible for distillation.

https://github.com/rgreenblatt/which_claude_is_k3/blob/main/...

https://x.com/alex_prompter/status/2079625670918046048

Like all rumors, who knows what's true or what's not.

solenoid09378• 4 hours ago

Distills are bad for the US economy because they compress margins that otherwise go to pushing the frontier. You'd see model progress dramatically slowed if US companies had to compete on distills.

JumpCrisscross6• 4 hours ago

You'd see model progress dramatically slowed if US companies had to compete on distills

We’re already competing on distills—they exist. The question is whether America will actually compete or if it will lean into its populist tendency and cede the market globally to China.

brazukadev5• 4 hours ago

bad for the US economy but good for the World economy.

paulpan• 4 hours ago

It's the exact parallel of how it'll play out for U.S. automakers: destined for irrelevance given their inability or unwillingness to compete against China in the EV market. Instead they pretend EVs are bad and cry for protectionist policies.

The sad fact here is that OpenAI and Anthropic are only looking for a max 1-year runway (Anthropic's is only a few months away) so that they can IPO and their VC investors cash out immensely. They do not care about AI safety or fairness, only to appease their VC overlords. But the public is being lied to and pitched this narrative that "open weight AI models are all bad".

AJRF• 5 hours ago

Who is in charge of AI strategy for the US? They are doing a terrible job!

derwiki• 5 hours ago

Cynically: someone who is just fully deferring to Claude or ChatGPT

More cynically: someone directly in the pocket of OpenAI

yogthos• 5 hours ago

and probably holding stocks in these companies

iugtmkbdfil8342• 5 hours ago

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.

rogerrogerr• 5 hours ago

They also could have used their brains.

iugtmkbdfil8342• 5 hours ago

I laughed, because it absolutely is an option and I dont see it happen.

sschueller3• 5 hours ago

And lets hope we learn a lesson.

That is the last thing that will happen. We don't seem to ever learn a lesson.

dgellow• 4 hours ago

2008 could have been that time :(

echelon5• 5 hours ago

I would rather we not lose the AI race so idiotically.

Winning the AI race means letting OpenAI and Anthropic face market forces.

Edit: Clearly other companies are doing well. ElevenLabs, Runway, FAL, RunPod, CoreWeave, Lambda, BaseTen, Lovable. These are real companies that didn't raise absurd amounts of capital. They've grown revenues at a solid clip, provide real value, and didn't go off the deep end with fundraising.

rkozik1989• 5 hours ago

How are we winning? Nobody has actually created a business model that works yet. Just because you can hemorrhage hundreds of billions of dollars to build the most performant model doesn't necessarily mean you're going to make your money back.

1over137• 5 hours ago

Who is 'we'?

trolleski• 5 hours ago

The current US climate is for most of the people to face the market forces while some have pay-to-play privileges...

aleqs• 4 hours ago

The companies in your 'edit' have raised huge amounts of money and are part of the same US VC shitcycle.

ryandrake2• 4 hours ago

It would be nice if AI turned out to not be yet another winner-take-all technology "race" that had to be won by one company.

metadat2• 3 hours ago

CoreWeave and Lambda have both raised absurd amounts of money, in the form of bank loans.

northernsausage• 5 hours ago

The other 95.8% of the world has entered the chat.

sschueller3• 5 hours ago

The US will try to force Europe to implement such restrictions as well.

pseudony• 4 hours ago

They have had many "good" ideas about one-sided deals of late - usually served with a "or else..." and then the "or else" happens anyway.

One wonders how many times that trick can be used. In fact, no need to wonder. Look around, the EU is busily spinning up arms industries, alternative payment platforms and expanding trade agreements with nearly everyone else.

Yes. The US can try. But while we haven't filed for divorce yet, we are definitely looking elsewhere.

JSR_FDED3• 4 hours ago

If European companies host Chinese models there’s no way to make the usual “privacy” argument. Nor can they claim monopoly. What’s left then, ban math?

echelon5• 5 hours ago

Fuck these two companies.

Fuck Sam and Dario.

These fucking assholes want to selfishly sink our country and our competitiveness because their valuations are tied to a thin little moat, and they moronically raised way too much capital. They think regulation can save them, when in actuality it will doom all of us.

Go to hell, OpenAI and Anthropic.

Call your senators right now.

sschueller3• 5 hours ago

The problem isn't only them, it's all the greedy investors and enablers around them thinking they can hold the potato just long enough to enrich themselves before the whole things explodes. The "enablers" are the real problem and this is why Elon is still not behind bars.

wokkel• 3 hours ago

I don't think senators will do a lot seeing the state of us politics at the moment (European perspective).

throwa3562622• 5 hours ago

"Why it matters: ...

The big picture: ...

Zoom in:...

Zoom out:..."

I wonder if they used an American or Chinese LLM to write this article?

ForHackernews• 5 hours ago

Nah, that's Axios house style for their readership of extremely busy/important illiterates.

throwa3562622• 5 hours ago

You are right, all their recent articles are written this way :(

Still, if feels very LLM-y with their short sentences, definitive statements and a love for lists when none is needed.

On the other hand, maybe Axios was such dominant component in the training dataset that now every LLM speaks like this...

lantry• 5 hours ago

I think axios has always used this style

andy992• 5 hours ago

Yeah this makes it unreadable for me, immediately distracted by how stupid it is and lose interest in the article. As someone else noted, it’s people who think they are writing for an “executive” audience that have never been within 100 feet of an executive.

TeMPOraL• 4 hours ago

I bounced off that at first, too, but I'm glad I revisited. It's exactly what I wanted from most news. All the relevant information up front. None of the bullshit of regular news reporting.

Alpha30312• 4 hours ago

I was under the impression Axios did that kind of shit even before LLMs, though I admit I haven't refreshed my memory on older Axios articles before this statement.

randomname4325• 5 hours ago

Ironic that US companies are monopolistically pushing FUD for regulation and China is pushing open source to the world. How the tables have turned. The reality is the AI trade and "bubble" is masking an otherwise flat, inflated economy. History tells us that the US position doesn't end well.

mosura2• 5 hours ago

The fact these two cos are bleating about this while having built their empires on IP theft is just insane.

They act like people don’t see it and then wonder why there might be any resentment towards AI companies.

I am pro AI but there has long been a cultural problem with mercenary attitudes in the big data/ML and now AI world of which this is just the latest most extreme manifestation.

seydor• 5 hours ago

This is so boring, it's like the tarriffs on chinese EVs.

abroszka33• 5 hours ago

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.

sodapopcan3• 4 hours ago

nothing these big tech companies hate more than competition

Their users? (Not to be confused with their users' money)

pferde2• 4 hours ago

No, they do not feel about their users one way or another. As soon as they have their monopoly, they no longer need to.

an0malous• 4 hours ago

“competition is for losers” — Peter Thiel

JSR_FDED3• 4 hours ago

He’s just the gift that keeps on giving, isn’t he?

stego-tech4• 5 hours ago

And to think I got warned in another post that I need to be nicer/more professional in discussing this topic.

Yeah. Nah.

Bringing out the same drum I’ve been banging for years now, these companies have never actually cared about ensuring safe AI, regulation, or ensuring it benefits all humanity. It has always, always, been about control and their profit margins. Their actions have never reflected any sort of positive, shared human benefit since OpenAI released ChatGPT, and they’ll never actually provide said shared benefit when it comes down to benefitting everyone versus benefitting themselves.

The technology is built off wholesale theft of protected works without compensation; at least China gives most of those models back, for free, in the form of open-weights.

It’s the Princess Bride meme but for AI: “you’re trying to take what I’ve rightfully stolen!” I’m tired of having to put on some sort of mask of decency and professionalism to discuss a topic whose counterparty gets to wallow in toxic waste without recourse, and these sorts of stories only reinforce that despite being a glib jerk about it, I’m still on the high road, here.

More folks should join us in open mockery of hypocritical whinging from technological robber barons.

GiorgioG2• 4 hours ago

Anyone who thinks these companies ever cared about any of that is naive.

Davidzheng• 4 hours ago

Then I am naive, but I think they cared before they got powerful and chatgpt release.

serial_dev2• 4 hours ago

Developing the thing they say will cause the end of the world?

Look, if I was worried about nuclear bombs, I wouldn’t work on a nuclear bomb developing research center.

It’s all fake and pompous garbage.

stego-tech4• 4 hours ago

I mean naivety is the default until wisdom born of experience prevails. I bought into the “do no evil” mantra of Google, and boy howdy did I learn the hard lessons from that.

It’s partly not arbitrarily punishing the naive unless they refuse to learn the lesson. Invite them in, acknowledging the error in judgement, and help them to be better going forward.

That’s how we win.

williamdclt2• 4 hours ago

Maybe they cared, but that's always been irrelevant. "Show me the incentive and i'll show you the outcome": the only incentive for a company in our economic system is to make as much money as possible, anything in the way of that will get eroded by incentives (principled people get fired, or quit, or their principles weaken, or they get forced into doing things against their principles, or they get outcompeted, or...).

Thinking that an actor in a system will go against the incentives of the system (at least at scale and over time) is naive.

Flip-per• 3 hours ago

How about Volvo giving away their patented 3-point safety belt design for free to all competitors?

https://techandmedialaw.com/open-patent-rights-for-seatbelts...

(edit: sorry, re-reading your comment you were more directly referring to the AI companies and this context, I interpreted this more generally on my first glance)

epolanski2• 4 hours ago

at least China gives most of those models back, for free, in the form of open-weights.

China also publishes a lot of impactful research in the open which has benefitted US labs too.

john_strinlai3• 4 hours ago

And to think I got warned in another post that I need to be nicer/more professional in discussing this topic.

it wasn't really "be nicer" and im surprised that was your takeaway; your last comment which was flagged had no substance. it was boring. ("i hate american aitechbros". neat.) at least this comment has some conversation starter in it.

nozzlegear2• 4 hours ago

Bringing out the same drum I’ve been banging for years now, these companies have never actually cared about ensuring safe AI, regulation, or ensuring it benefits all humanity. It has always, always, been about control and their profit margins. Their actions have never reflected any sort of positive, shared human benefit since OpenAI released ChatGPT, and they’ll never actually provide said shared benefit when it comes down to benefitting everyone versus benefitting themselves.

Preach! Anthropic and OpenAI care about one thing, and it's not safety or the benefit of humanity: it's regulatory capture. All that other shit they wring their hands about – Anthropic especially – is invariably a marketing tactic or a persuasion tactic meant to convince us that A) they have the most capable, dangerous AIs and wouldn't you like to use them; and B) only they can be trusted to develop them because look at all these precautions they take and all of the blog posts/tweets their founders write about the oncoming doom of humanity.

usef-6• 4 hours ago

What should they do instead? As far as I can tell from their actions they (Anth) are true believers about safety

jrflo4• 4 hours ago

No large company has ever cared about anything other than the financials, this is not specific to AI.

brookst2• 4 hours ago

Generalizations are embarrassing.

Companies don’t have souls or minds. Some people in some large companies have absolutely cared about social good, art, and other things outside of financials.

leoc• 4 hours ago

This is actually not the case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co. However a look at Henry Ford’s personal priorities shows that there’s a be-careful-what-you-wish-for aspect to this (also arguably visible to a lesser extent in eg. Mark Zuckerberg’s dual-class-structure-enabled control on Facebook—and in Musk’s de facto control over his rambling empire).

pferde2• 4 hours ago

No, you don't get to play the "everybody does that" card. These companies started out claiming to care about openness, and to have moral high ground.

adrian_b2• 3 hours ago

Sadly, this has become very true during the last decades.

However, a half of century ago there were a non-negligible number of large companies for which there existed more important priorities than the financials, e.g. reputation and customer satisfaction, for instance Hewlett-Packard (which was something extremely different from those who have inherited this name).

asdaqopqkq• 4 hours ago

also China actually legally pays the API costs even when distilling. OPenAI and ANtro just straight up abused scraping bots which overloaded servers

usef-6• 4 hours ago

They are scraping too, and don't follow copyright any more thoroughly (less if you count all the licensing openai, anth are doing now)

ACCount37• 4 hours ago

What China does is: buy accounts or API inference, often through shady methods, and then resell it at a cost/small profit/small loss (access to advanced AI models is often restricted for users in China, so there's a demand for region lock bypasses) - while saving all the traffic between the real AI users and the AI platform for future analysis, including distillation.

Being an "AI inference middleman" is pretty lucrative, and AI companies have only started to crack down on it.

brookst2• 4 hours ago

The thing about screaming and waving your arms is it makes it hard for people to connect with the argument.

A quick scan shows a lack of rigor that usually points towards zealotry rather than a reasoned position: you imply that models are only trained on copyrighted work, you don’t address the ridiculous “copyright forever, nothing goes public domain” policies that got us to this place, you don’t distinguish between training on an 80 year old copyrighted work whose author is dead and rights are just in a company portfolio, and you assert that neither OpenAI nor Anthropic has ever done anything altruistic.

If you enjoy the screaming, have at it. If you want to persuade people, dialing it down a few notches and at least giving token acknowledgement that nuance exists would help.

aeon_ai• 4 hours ago

The latent space must have property boundaries as real and respected as those in the physical domain, lest we lose our ability to capitalize on them.

For now, and into the future, I hope that we protect that unique and novel idea of an anthropomorphic mouse, which should be expanded to cover all forms of anthropomorphism, if we're being honest with ourselves.

And, to that point, the protection of that idea should also extend to the (clearly infringing) hit 90s YA book series Animorphs, as it somewhat sounds like anthropomorphism.

Protect their rights! Anything produced within the conceptual acreage that has been clearly marked and claimed is theft!

twister2920• 4 hours ago

have you considered that you're not the person this argument is trying to convince?

Yokohiii2• 4 hours ago

The thing about screaming and waving your arms is it makes it hard for people to connect with the argument.

The question is whether people like Altman, Amodei, Musk are part of the common case in Hanlon's razor or they want to trigger emotional responses to gain agency in the mess.

stego-tech4• 4 hours ago

If you enjoy the screaming, have at it. If you want to persuade people, dialing it down a few notches and at least giving token acknowledgement that nuance exists would help.

You’re not going sufficiently far back in comment histories (or using AI summaries of it from existing search tooling), or viewing the entire body of work I’ve written, shared, or discussed about all of those topics for the past twenty years.

I scream and wave my arms because nobody cared for decorum. I cut to the meat of the argument because nobody cares for context. Hell, this is the comments section for crying out loud; nobody is expecting a nuanced treatise about systemic interactions of multiple market and policy forces that resulted in this specific outcome in the comments section, even on HN.

Further, I suspect most folks here don’t actually care. I scream and wave my arms because it’s actually had the best results in outreach thus far - people see the flailing, read the bullet point, check the history, and somehow decide to reach out to me for more context (which I am always happy to give). When greeted with a wall of plaintext on an algorithmic site, the trained human response is to basically fuck off and go find a dopamine hit elsewhere, not stick around and read someone’s shoulda-been-a-blog-post on a social media comment page.

For all the crowing about “decorum” and “professionalism” and “intelligent debate”, the grim reality is that such concepts can actually detract from arguments by making it seem like we have time to discuss these further, that things aren’t that bad yet, that we can really think this through.

To which I say: no, we cannot. This language is a dire threat, it is a crimson red flag of intent to deliberately cause harm. You do not make an impassioned and polite argument about the nature of market forces or copyright policy with a mugger brandishing a gun, you do something about it.

palmotea4• 4 hours ago

you don’t address the ridiculous “copyright forever, nothing goes public domain” policies that got us to this place

1. You're mischaracterizing and exaggerating the policies to falsely support your point. Things go into the public domain all the time: https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2026/.

2. It's not like the model companies had the attitude "oh copyright is too long, we disagree on the term." Their attitude was precisely: "We want it and we don't give a fuck about you. Published yesterday, published 50 years ago? We will take it, we won't pay for it, and we will use it to replace you and make ourselves rich. Don't like it? Suck my data center."

Ensorceled• 4 hours ago

A quick scan shows a lack of rigor that usually points towards zealotry rather than a reasoned position

You're doing the same thing:

you imply that models are only trained on copyrighted work

Actually, they said "The technology is built off wholesale theft of protected works without compensation". The word "only" never appears here, nor is it really implied.

you don’t address the ridiculous “copyright forever, nothing goes public domain” policies that got us to this place

This is pure "whataboutism". Both things can be bad.

I mean, you didn't address wealth inequality or global warning.

phailhaus• 4 hours ago

"Quick scan"? It's a few paragraphs. You can't read a few paragraphs? What's the point of replying when you don't even know what you're replying to?

binoct• 4 hours ago

I don’t see any screaming and waving arms in the parent. It’s a passionate but well reasoned and carefully presented case. If that is to be dismissed as zealotry we’ll all need to stick to writing journal papers to avoid the label.

If anything your “copyright forever” drumbeat and incorrect read of “only being trained on copyrighted works” are more hyperbolic than anything you’re responding to.

Also, the models from China are only being released open weights as competitive positioning against the globally more used competition. If the Chinese companies had a dominant market position they’d be falling prey to the same forces that have caused OpenAI and Anthropic to behave the way they do.

OptionX• 4 hours ago

Such investment in technicalities to undermine the above post could itself speak of zealotry to a certain side in itself if one was prone to cynicism.

Not to mention that those nuances, as you state, mean very little. To say it was trained solely on copyrighted material or to say it was trained in large part on copyrighted material doesn't much move the needle over the fact it was done, a lot. Making a distinction between an "80 year old copyrighted work" or a recent one is also moot as it a matter of public record they themselves didn't make that distinction and happily fed on both kinds.

On to not being able to say they didn't ever do anything altruistic, well animal rights and welfare had great strides under the Nazi regime, not sure it evens out the rest. The same logic can be applied to the current state of affairs, doing a little good does not even out a lot of bad.

In closing, nuance is relevant when its relevant, after that its just being pedantic.

rowanG077• 4 hours ago

Get real, you think LLMs got to where they are by training on 80 year old works? Your point is technically true, just basically irrelevant for LLM training.

jzebedee• 4 hours ago

I think you can realize how ludicrous it is to invoke 80 year old copyrights for a product whose main use case is coding. How much code from 1946 was it lawfully ingesting?

Avicebron• 4 hours ago

If you would like to discuss the nuances you're welcome to elaborate. If the end result of this nuanced is they get to stay kings of the crab bucket and reap greater and greater rewards it's reasoning at both ends to get the middle you want.

krs_• 4 hours ago

you don’t address the ridiculous “copyright forever, nothing goes public domain” policies that got us to this place, you don’t distinguish between training on an 80 year old copyrighted work whose author is dead and rights are just in a company portfolio

You're describing what Pirate Party proponents have been championing since the start. Not that I disagree with that notion. Copyright law needs to be changed for modern times. But the laws as currently exist are what they are.

uncivilized• 4 hours ago

If you really believe OpenAI, Anthropic, or any corporation for that matter has done something truly altruistic then I have a bridge to sell you.

zzzeek• 4 hours ago

there's persuasion, and then there's inspiring people already on your side. the upvotes/downvotes will give you a clue who the audience turns out to be. it was an upvote from me.

paulddraper2• 4 hours ago

Fortunately, some people see no reason to hamstring development.

Meanwhile America is tying itself in knots: politicians and bureaucrats are banning new data centers, piling on state regulations, and pushing for new federal agencies to pre-approve frontier models.
This is how you lose the AI race. The rest of the world won’t play by our rules if we bog ourselves down. Permissionless innovation is how America won the internet and became the technological envy of the world. We can do it again with AI -- while addressing risks in a targeted way -- or we’ll watch our lead evaporate. [1]

- David Sacks, Chair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology

[1] https://x.com/DavidSacks/status/2078092271296143593

voakbasda• 4 hours ago

If only reason would prevail in the Whitehouse….

jvuygbbkuurx• 4 hours ago

I think originally they had good intentions. But they just cannot afford not to pull up the ladder, they raised too much.

d5lt5• 4 hours ago

I think originally they had good intentions.

It was never the intent. What we are seeing is the methodology that Peter Thiel (hello, ycombinator) described in his book Zero to One [0]: "Competition is for losers"

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_to_One

williamdclt2• 4 hours ago

Intentions never win over incentives, especially as time and scale increase. And we live in an economic system where the only incentive is "make as much money as possible".

arionhardison2• 4 hours ago

I fully agree; but we also MUST STOP PRETENDING like HN and YC are good faith actors here. They are not. They blatantly curate (by flagging) comments and do everything possible to help both companies do this. Its not just OpenAI/Anthropic, there is a toxic ecosystem here supporting itself and doing everything possible to subvert the will of the people. There is 0 interest in merit and absolute focus on regulatory capture here and all YC investors and staff are fully complicit.

echelon5• 4 hours ago

It's not HN. It's the readers.

There are lots of Anthropic and OpenAI employees here.

There are also lots of people that totally hate AI here.

If they don't like your comment, some of them will flag you. I get caught up in this frequently. The flagging strongly correlates with the audience that the headline sentiment attracts.

In a thread like this that is laser-focused on real criticism of OpenAI and Anthropic you'll do just fine to call out their bad behavior.

igleria• 4 hours ago

More folks should join us in open mockery of hypocritical whinging from technological robber barons.

I am with you 100% but mockery will not affect their wallets. which is the only thing they care about.

stego-tech4• 4 hours ago

We should mock them because others look to us as the subject matter experts. It’s mirror neurons: if we mock these entities, these companies, as the technical experts we are, and we show others why they’re deserving of such mockery, then they will generally replicate those behaviors.

You’re more likely to laugh at a comedian when everyone else does, even if you don’t get the joke.

lpapez• 4 hours ago

Who are you and why should we listen to you banging on the drum?

Memento mori.

maxloh2• 4 hours ago

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.

commoner4• 3 hours ago

OpenAI is currently a PBC that metastasized out of the original nonprofit also called OpenAI which owns 26% of that PBC. But yes, it is ridiculous.

Levitz• 4 hours ago

Yes they only care about money. That's what corporations usually do.

And I'll take that 10 times out of 10 over China's role in all of this, which is specifically to disrupt and sabotage the rest.

I can trust Anthropic and OpenAI to have economic interests. I can't trust the same from Chinese companies, which I can actually trust to have geopolitic interests.

SimianSci3• 4 hours ago

This has more to do with two seperate approaches to innovation. One which favors a small handful of firms establishing full control over a monopoly on the market. And another favoring the wilderness of free market economics.

The only country with anything to gain or lose here is the United States because it decided to play the game of market domination. Either it ends up with market domination and wins, or it doesnt and loses. China's result will remain what its set out to do, which is to create a technology that will support millions of small bespoke companies unbeholden to a larger firm serving all sectors of the economy.

Alpha30312• 4 hours ago

As we all know, the US is entirely free of geopolitical interests, which is why there was a US–Japan trade war in the late 80s.

commoner4• 4 hours ago

I have no reason to care about the interests of these companies. My interests are best served with a competitive selection of open weights models available for my use.

OpenAI has the year-old GPT-OSS, and Anthropic has never released any open weights models. Meanwhile, other companies are delivering a steady stream of high-quality open weights models every month, and I'm not going to stop using them just because some other people don't like the country they were developed in.

Varelion• 4 hours ago

Warned by YComb? I got something similar when discussing Flock.

Tech companies, in the end of the day, will stand together to suppress dissent under the guise of anything nearing plausible deniability.

john_strinlai3• 4 hours ago

Warned by YComb? I got something similar when discussing Flock.

i was curious, because stego-tech also misrepresented the reason for their mod warning, and yours is the same.

you didnt get a warning because you were "discussing flock". its because you made a boring comment about "oligarch slushfund to pay bots" for "pro-flock astroturfing". that's not "discussing flock", its vague accusations of astroturfing.

its like, super duper clear in the guidelines that if you suspect astroturfing or botting that you should email the mods so they can investigate it.

dang has some pithy line about "mod less, not more when there is a relation to ycomb" and its true. ive ripped on flock plenty of times (fuck flock!). just put some actual substance in your comments.

sourcecodeplz• 4 hours ago

it is not just copyrighted works.

openai and anthropic and google etc hire PHDs to create datasets by solving problems, writing thinking traces.

then they train their models on those datasets.

also as another user said, what is this 80+ years to protect some text? its ridiculous

classified• 3 hours ago

It's only ridiculous for the big thieves, but if you violate copyright, you'll pay dearly. Calling it ridiculous will not protect you.

globalnode• 4 hours ago

I agree with you. I read recently Anthropic had to pay 1.5B in fines for stealing copyrighted works. You know, if us normies get caught stealing, we go to jail and don't get to keep the loot, yet these companies get a slap on the wrist and keep everything. Its tragically hilarious.

therealpygon2• 2 hours ago

Yes, loved watching how people constantly got downvoted for warning this is what would happen, then it starts happening and the “yeah but” fluff starts. Corporate apologists all the way down.

ClosedAI executive literally posted that the administration should disseminate FUD through various agencies in order to protect their profits. Commodie has been crying wolf for years to protect their profits. Now they are openly literally conspiring to protect their profits.

“How could we have seen it coming?!” Easily.

hashstring• 1 hour ago

Yes, and thank China for open AI.

dang• 26 minutes ago

I got warned in another post that I need to be nicer/more professional in discussing this topic

If you're talking about https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49016842, that's inaccurate, as anyone who follows the link can see. It has nothing to do with being professional, and doesn't relate to any specific topic. It has to do with the site rules at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, which you're plainly breaking.

We want curious conversation here, not indignant fulmination. These are incompatible, because the latter destroys the former the way wildfires destroy parks.

Since we don't want HN to turn into scorched earth, we have no choice but to ban accounts that repeatedly post like this. I don't want to ban you, but flagrantly doing again exactly what we just asked you to stop suggests that you don't want to use HN as intended. If that's wrong, and you actually do want to use HN as intended, please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the intended spirit of the site more to heart.

jerrythegerbil• 5 hours ago

This AI generated article about closed-weights model providers collaborating for additional scrutiny of open weights models, where the article itself has the tell-tale structure of being written by Claude Opus, which is aware it is a closed-weight model.

Thank goodness no one is taking any of this seriously, because it could never be anything more than a machine generated hatchet job.

A faster and better educated understanding of the subject matter could be achieved by standing in front of a wood chipper and dropping a brick in it to see what happens. “Yes, there were results! But why? Why to literally every variable involved?”

mlok• 5 hours ago

OpenAI vs. Open AIs

I knew this would happen someday.

hmokiguess• 5 hours ago

That's what you get living on borrowed time. The entire thing started off with the wrong foot, using copyrighted and licensed work without attribution followed by a nonsensical illusion of "fair play" because you wanted to win. This is just one way where the moat will fall, the next wave will be when consumer and local inference catches up.

zkmon2• 5 hours ago

We might see people rushing to download the Chinese models expecting a ban, like they mobbed stores for tissue paper a few years ago.

plagiarist• 5 hours ago

Two companies stole trillions of tokens worth of IP from Americans so of course the US government will step in and protect "their IP" from competitors

baxtr2• 5 hours ago

How ironic that OpenAI is fighting Open AI.

fedeb953• 4 hours ago

It is open, but they open it for you.

tsoukase• 4 hours ago

Naming plays top role in a corp's success. OpenAI chose terrible ones: a cheating, barely legal for the company and a scientific abbreviation for their popular product. I predict market fate will give them a lesson by pushing them to failure.

jacobgold• 5 hours ago

Humanity discovered a technique for compressing the world's information into a few files that fit on a USB drive. It's just insane that some people thought they'd get to be the only ones who get to possess them.

solenoid09378• 4 hours ago

This is such a naive take. What happens when "those files on a USB drive" turn into a zero day button that can harm millions of people?

What happens when they help authoritarian dictatorships build nuclear weapons?

What happens when they teach average people the steps needed to make a bioweapon at home?

Every society restricts dangerous capabilities at the end of the day, because most people realize there is a crossover point between the danger of the capability and it being available to everyone.

mring336212• 3 hours ago

Some very bad people already have a "button that can harm millions of people".

Some more very bad people are building them.

This democratizes that ability.

Might be good. Might be bad. Might be both.

Fuck you for thinking you know better than everyone else.

syrrim• 8 minutes ago

What happens when "those files on a USB drive" turn into a zero day button that can harm millions of people?

We need to make sure only the chinese and criminals have that zero day button and western companies can't discover zero days in their own systems to protect themselves? Is that what you're getting at?

q8zd3• 4 hours ago

Those people really believe in the idea of a "technological republic", heh.

manoDev2• 4 hours ago

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).

Ekaros3• 4 hours ago

And I would not be so sure about cloud... It is like building massive brothel and then the rush simply going away and you still having loan to pay.

manoDev2• 4 hours ago

There's money now to _build_ these massive data centers. If there is long-term money to operate, we'll see.

It might mean we'll get cheaper cloud compute in the future, but I'm also positive on the market's ability to absorb the excess capacity quickly. It's Jervon's paradox.

jake-coworker• 4 hours ago

Regulation won't beat engineering here. China will continue to release open weight models that are impossible to ban without unprecedented surveillance in Western countries.

AI labs need to innovate if they want to win. Open models are capitalism. Ideally Western companies should get more efficient, but if we can't then we should be doing the opposite of regulation, and subsidizing western models.

mosura2• 4 hours ago

Given all the models were effectively subsidized by being granted free access to copyrighted data for training on it only makes sense for the resulting weights to be free.

jillesvangurp• 4 hours ago

There's a baby and bathwater situation here. If the US actually starts entertaining protectionism here, it might push most of the rest of the world (including places like the EU, India, South America, etc.) away from Openai and Anthropic towards other models not controlled by the US (which is mostly models made in China currently).

OpenAI and Anthropic kind of need that revenue to justify their current valuations. The US market by itself is too small for that. And if that money dries up, it's going to be much harder for them to maintain their technical head start. The US starting to impose all sorts of restrictions here would not be helpful.

skeledrew• 4 hours ago

More and more I'm getting the feeling that I should drop my Claude account and fully move to Chinese providers. This is sickening, especially with every mention being about "the US evaluating" aka controlling. Meanwhile us in the rest of the world can only look on and hope cracks remain for us to benefit.

oefrha• 4 hours ago

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has argued that open-weight models are harder to keep safe because, once their weights are released, developers lose the ability to revoke access, update safety guardrails or prevent misuse.

Yes, I totally love the fact that when using the closed source models that I pay for, once released, they can still shut me out or silently poison the results based on IP address, timezone, hostname, keywords or just the general vibes, etc. at any time (all of which already proved to have happend or even admitted to / bragged about). /s

epolanski2• 4 hours ago

I don't think it's ever a good idea to change the rules of the game in order to stay competitive.

In recent years, with US further turning their back from globalization into America first protectionism, the rest of the world is getting increasingly tired and slowly de risking out of US products and tech.

European companies are either suffering us levies, or us interference with whom they can conduct business with, or consistently risking that their service and cloud providers can become liabilities over night.

EU is also strongly pushing for US alternatives in payments, telecoms, space, etc. And I didn't even mention politics yet.

US is still enjoying an apex position, but it may overestimate its gripe and underestimate resentments (Greenland threats have been a point of no return).

The actions of US looks like those of a decaying empire.

What plays in US hands is that its biggest "allies" are mature democracies, and mature democracies really procrastinate any painful change unless they have to confront it, thus it may keep getting away with this for very long.

m_ke• 4 hours ago

I wonder what they'll do when there are open european and american models that lap them. Will we see "Open"AI claim open ai is a threat to humanity?

foco_tubi• 4 hours ago

How can distillation be considered IP theft, when IP theft is the defacto method in how the closed-weight models were trained?

fedeb953• 4 hours ago

because on one hand you have many citizens that hardly can organize themselves and with few resources, on the other a big company funded by other big companies. The law isn't the same for everyone.

throwaway836123• 4 hours ago

My bet: Thanks to China, compute gets cheaper, models get better, both economically and qualitatively, and AI becomes increasingly commoditized rather than controlled by a select few.

If I wager on anything else, it won’t matter, because it would mean living in a dystopian hell where any bet is meaningless.

andy992• 4 hours ago

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.

StevenWaterman2• 4 hours ago

model welfare

I shouldn't get in arguments about this stuff online, but have you actually sat down and thought about this in-depth? It's pretty normal to have a gut reaction that this is insane, but it's worth thinking about.

If we replaced every neuron in your brain, one by one, with a silicon equivalent, would you stop being conscious? At what point? Would you be able to tell?

If yes, what about if we took those silicon neurons and instead simulated them, IE perfectly simulated an entire human brain, neuron-for-neuron, would that be conscious?

If yes, where is the line at which code starts being conscious? Can you categorically say that existing LLMs are on one side or the other? Would scaling up or down change that?

There are robust philosophical positions on all sides of this argument.

georgeecollins• 4 hours ago

> If we replaced every neuron in your brain, one by one, with a silicon equivalent, would you stop being conscious?

If we put your brain in a jar, would you be a person? Would you have normal consciousness? Honestly I don't know and I am not the person to ask.

But the brain is just a computer metaphor has flaws, particularly when you take account how poorly the brain is understood.

rootlocus• 4 hours ago

There's a reason we have expressions like "train of thought". Going from one idea to another is pretty much how we think. Much like going from one token to another.

Lutzb• 4 hours ago

ARTHUR I'm sorry -- did you just say you need my brain?

BENJY MOUSE Yes. To extract the question.

ARTHUR You can't have my brain. I'm using it.

FRANKY MOUSE Barely.

BENJY MOUSE We can replace it if you think it's important. An electronic brain maybe.

FRANKY MOUSE A simple one should suffice. Who would know the difference?

ARTHUR I would!

FRANKY MOUSE No, you wouldn't. We could program you not to.

AlexandrB2• 4 hours ago

If we replaced every neuron in your brain, one by one, with a silicon equivalent, would you stop being conscious? At what point? Would you be able to tell?

The idea that we could have a silicon equivalent at all is already a huge assumption. For starters, the silicon equivalent cannot grow or kill neural connections or neurons as needed. Biological systems have a number of properties that silicon systems just don't at the moment.

solenoid09378• 4 hours ago

There's no point. HN is arrogant and thinks it understands the subject matter better than the people that have worked on it their whole lives.

Everything is a conspiracy here.

morbicer• 3 hours ago

Then they should stop the development and focus on the identifying of consciousness. But wait, there's money to be made now so screw that and just talk big words to press.

everforward2• 3 hours ago

I don’t even have to try to address whether models or conscious or not to point out the absurdity.

8.3% of US households had low food security at some point in 2024 (read: had to resort to less varied diets like rice and beans, or visit a food pantry).

5.4% had very low food security at some point in 2024 (at least one family member had to disrupt their eating patterns and skip meals or eat less due to food availability).

Those numbers don’t overlap, it’s 13.7% experienced some variety of food insecurity.

It’s worse in families with children, 18.4% experienced some form of food insecurity. Thankfully, even in most households with very low food security the adults bear the brunt and make sure the kids eat enough, but in 0.9% of households even the children have very low food security.

Talking about welfare for AI models is utterly insane while those numbers are above 0%. I do not give a single shit about model welfare when we have human children skipping meals. Frankly it’s the inverse and if Anthropic has money to piss away on this then we should increase their tax rate and feed some kids, fix some roads, do some good. They can go look at model welfare after they’ve chucked us into the post-scarcity universe they keep telling us is 2 model releases away.

serial_dev2• 4 hours ago

the only thing that point into you being in a bubble is thinking that credibility matters? In the end, companies will buy the best models for their use case based on capabilities, price, ease of access, etc, they will sign up with some providers and coders will just use whatever their employees give them 95% of the case.

axegon_• 4 hours ago

They are relying on the same tactics Apple and Tesla used - loyal, fanatical fanbase drowning every legitimate criticism. Their fanatical fanbase is doing the real heavy lifting, not some joint-statement: "I haven't written any code in a year man, this is so good", "you are just a denier that will be irrelevant in 2 months", "you are not knowledgeable on the subject of ai", "you are just a hater" list goes on, I've heard it all.

As I said a day or two ago, the open weights Chinese models may be good (hey might be better even) but let's not fool ourselves - the only reason the Chinese are pushing for open weights is because they were not the first people at the party and that's the only way they can fight against openai and anthropic. They are just as much of an enemy as both openai and anthropic - hopefully enough people realize that without supporting either. Just sit back and let them eat each-other. That's the only sensible thing to do.

echelon5• 4 hours ago

They have no fanbase anymore. They poisoned all of that goodwill.

RIP Anthropic "good guys" January 2021 - January 2026.

Earlier this year they limited how you could use your subscription. It's been rapidly downhill since then.

nunez2• 4 hours ago

Interestingly, Apple will Sherlock the pants off of OpenAI and Anthropic once they release Siri+. At least for B2C.

dd8601fn3• 3 hours ago

I see little evidence of business-oriented cult followings, here.

Certainly people have preferred tools. And if people argued with you about the merits of llms, that’s obviously a different thing.

I suspect if a third provider blew the two out of the water tomorrow with an amazing model, people would want to try it right away. Assuming the company wasn’t grinding up kittens to produce it, or something equally noxious.

Yokohiii2• 4 hours ago

I think we are in a chaotic state because we don't know how the whole AI thing will play out longer term. FUD tactics are a choice in this phase to take advantage of the public perception. You have to assume that especially many non technical people are quite concerned and would probably agree to any regulation to make them feel safer.

Of course it also reveals how unethical these actors are.

f8ght• 4 hours ago

idk if its competition?? if tech evolution from ability to distill from libgen to ability to distill from another closed source model means the closed weights models collapse, maybe claude/ openai can still evolve using ability to train further with chat logs from their users...but i think if someone makes algo that can fine tune open model on their own business logic/codebase/internal processes that is what most companies and customers want, they dont need or use 90% of the weights anyway only those that are relevant to their business processes,,then company will pay for optimized server hardware still but on their own weights if that is where they can get good tps. its always good if u own ur own weights and can fine tune but that is priveledge rn limited to large corporations not small business

cloudie78• 4 hours ago

They can go pound sand.

WarmWash3• 4 hours ago

If the US government was bankrolling OAI and Anthropic, and those models were free, would the situation be better?

simonw• 4 hours ago

Is the headline here ("OpenAI and Anthropic unite against open-weight AI risks to their bottom line") an editorialized version of the original "OpenAI and Anthropic unite against China's open models" or did Axios change theirs?

My_Name• 4 hours ago

Ah, the ever present American Exceptionalism. China really does not care what happens within the borders of the US, at least as far as stopping them developing their own models.

Make laws, make policy, ban them from US markets. It won't stop China doing whatever the hell they want. Like SpaceX developed reusable rockets and China thought "That's a good idea" and now they have their own reusable rockets.

They will do that with AI too, and fast. Having your head in the sand just exposes your rear end, and you've removed your ability to see the predator coming...

iamleppert• 4 hours ago

They can try to do whatever they want to do. They can ban Huggingface. It just means we will get our models from torrents, or have someone from China ship us an SD card with the weights on it.

The only practical open source models, that can be fine tuned and are of sufficient quality are all Chinese. The only thing that has been released by labs are yesterday's tech. And that's exactly how they want it. They don't care about open source, don't care about the community. It's just another funnel for them to capture customers into their closed tech, which is where the actual serious high quality models are.

Tenoke2• 4 hours ago

I am very pro open source models - I use them every single day.. But we obviously don't want everyone to have capabilities like and beyond what caused the huggingface incident in every domain, so it's not like it all comes from bottom line cynicism.

el_io• 4 hours ago

Then you're not very pro open source models.

solenoid09378• 4 hours ago

"I'm pro self defense but don't want everyone to have an ICBM."

"Then you're not pro self defense!"

rs_rs_rs_rs_rs• 4 hours ago

ut we obviously don't want everyone to have capabilities like and beyond what caused the huggingface incident in every domain

Why not? These tools are also very useful for defense, you just need to apply them.

Read the HuggingFace postmortem, they had to use an open model because all others they tried refused to do any work.

Tenoke2• 3 hours ago

Because sadly, as much as I wish it wasn't the case, offense is easier, more impactful than defense.

lolc• 4 hours ago

You can say you don't want the bad guys to get the capability until and after the reality hits you. But this arrogant hope stands in the way of developing an effective response. The handlers of closed models would like you to be dependent on them for protection, this much is clear.

fedeb953• 4 hours ago

They are basically trying to pursue a model copyright.

That's funny, because they made their models exactly because of open stuff on the web.

But they will loose this battle. There is no way to technically avoid open models to be created, so they will be created.

JSR_FDED3• 4 hours ago

They saw the threat a long time ago, but then it was in their interest to not have pesky regulations get in the way of world domination.

Now they’re being outcompeted and so we should suddenly have regulations.

Time to put your big boy pants on and compete.

prodigycorp2• 4 hours ago

The comments on this article are terrible. I can't believe it's gotten this toxic around here.

solenoid09378• 4 hours ago

HN loses its fucking mind the moment any topic related to AI safety is mentioned.

This website just does not fundamentally believe we are getting to AGI, or that RSI is a thing that can happen, and so anyone doing anything about it must have some evil ulterior motive.

prodigycorp2• 4 hours ago

It also doesn't seem to know what it wants. When Trump blocks Fable "there needs to be proper legislation, not an authoritarian controlling this". When an article discusses the legislative process "F' these companies!".

palmotea4• 4 hours ago

There is no greater moral priority than making Sam Altman and Dario Amodei into trillionaires. No greater. We all may die, or be pushed into poverty, but our sacrifice will be worth it to them.

paxys2• 4 hours ago

There’s a broader issue here that goes beyond OpenAI and Anthropic. In the last couple of years US economic growth has been driven almost entirely by AI and data center spending. It may not be too outlandish to claim that we are in a recession right now but it is hidden by the AI bubble and all the underlying circular financing.

So it isn’t just the two companies and their investors that have a vested interest in keeping the music playing, it’s the entire US government. No surprises then that government officials are now openly accusing Chinese companies of cheating. Sanctions and tariffs are probably going to follow.

maxloh2• 4 hours ago

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.

solenoid09378• 4 hours ago

"Openness" is not inherently a good thing, this is a naive techno libertarian mindset.

You don't hand every random script kiddie a zero day button. When models get better, you don't hand them an AGI that can help them make bioweapons or whatever.

When it comes to intelligence, there is a limit to openness that any sane non-tech-libertarian would agree on.

myaccountonhn• 4 hours ago

Why should some unelected US-based technocrats with a terrible track record get to decide for us?

amazingamazing• 4 hours ago

I always laugh when people defend the big AI labs and post archive.is links. Techies love copyright and ToS violations until they are targeted.

blackoil• 4 hours ago

As someone outside both USA and China. I think it is time to increase my spending on Chinese infra/services. It is imperative to have alternatives to US oligopolies else will be at whims of these techbros and govt elected by money and relgious fanaticism. So, bye-bye Claude; hello Kimi.

solenoid09378• 4 hours ago

As usual, HN and the media think they understand AI safety and the implications of the race to RSI better than the people that have worked on this their whole lives.

bethekidyouwant• 4 hours ago

This article doesn’t even say anything.

ben8bit• 4 hours ago

More and more these companies sound like they want to protect market share, instead of lose it to foreign models. I believe the cat's already out of the bag on this one. Regulatory capture and more export control will indeed push more people to Chinese models that are good enough right now. I'm not sure they actually realize that.

ExoticPearTree• 4 hours ago

So Anthropic/OpenAI is the new Microsoft and Open Weight models are the new Linux and its cancer?

https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Steve-Ballmer-call-Linux-a-can...

I guess it hurts the big AI companies knowing that AI can be way cheaper than what they sell.

ls_stats• 4 hours ago

So, they are just going to ban chinese models, close their eyes and pretend that both Anthropic and OpenAI are worth $1T?

positron26• 4 hours ago

Bill Gureley's talk on regulation comes to mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9cO3-MLHOM&t=1447s

The reason barking at open source will only get the dog thrown into the river is because there is a whole lot more cumulative power distributed among companies and consumers who don't want two incumbents to dictate which kinds of alternatives can exist.

Note that those rushing to the "all corpos evil" talking points will turn around and advocate delegating these decisions to "the government." This is the same government that they also claim is bought by the corporations. It's also the same government that will enforce the regulatory capture on behalf of the yucky corporation against the broad, diverse interests.

Thinking big vs small while embracing the biggest of the big is some kind of inconsistency that people need to deal with by looking in the mirror and finding some awareness. Nuance. If your problem model is wrong, so is every solution you propose except if your wrong model may get lucky from time to time. Not every broken model is a broken clock. Some broken models cannot admit the right answer ever.

The real dynamic on display here is broad, correlated mass of overlapping interests, big and small. The big pile of people and entities that don't want to be governed by OpenAI and Anthropic can push harder and win the tug of war. You don't have to like your temporary allies all the time, but at least know who they are and when you are aligned.

LurkandComment• 4 hours ago

1) This is going to be like Electric cars. You see how far ahead China is there for commercial viability for a wider consumer base

2) There are many reasons why Anthropic and Open Ai will collapse aside from this.

3) Wait until you have non-China models that are good enough. Hint: they already exist. Microsoft partnering with Mistral is a big red flag for OpenAI and Anthropic.

pandinus• 4 hours ago

National pride aside, we must decide if competition is good or is it bad. In the west we've been conditioned that competition is good and expect consequences and tradeoffs. In this case we're seeing incumbents trying to lobby government to secure their market share.

People rightfully question if these business models were ever feasible or sustainable to begin with. But isn't that the risk they took? We can certainly recognize that being displaced before realizing profit from your work is like a kick in the pants, but isn't that always supposed to be a possible outcome? I realize that is part of why we have intellectual property rights to reward innovators - but that isn't a universal concept in this global economy.

Which, some might argue, may be the point on the global stage. It is an ideological competition as well.

JumpCrisscross6• 4 hours ago

“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/

jimnotgym• 4 hours ago

I'm actually having a party when they both go bust. Maybe a festival?

Imagine having the brass neck to go and lobby for a rent-seeking monopoly?

TedDallas• 4 hours ago

Corporations are already pulling back from using expensive SotA closed models. The buffet is open weight. Just look at Databricks as an endpoint provider for both open weight and closed LLMs. Companies will utilize what is cheaper and does the job. We all know the market pressure is real and present. What has become truly apparent is that when (not if) mythos class open weight models get released, if cybersecurity folks and developers have no access to use them to help harden and guard infrastructure, it leaves the gates wide open to attach vectors which will not be defensible. This is the real danger that the vast majority of corporate entities should be caring about. Shutting down open models is setting up for serious security concerns.

The OpenAI/Huggingface debacle is patient-zero. Huggingface used GLM 5.2 to help mitigate and were unable to use more capable closed sota models for the analysis due to guardrails. It is a foot gun of the highest order. We should all be concerned. I feel like Captain Obvious saying this.

_tomasz• 4 hours ago

The irony of creating distilled models by training against closed-source models, which were themselves trained on copyrighted work without permission arguing it was fair use.

nunez2• 4 hours ago

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.

xvector• 4 hours ago

Am I the only one that finds the "laissez faire" attitude of the tech crowd insufferable?

There is this chronic refusal to believe that new technologies can cause harm.

My team works on testing risks from both companies' leading models and I feel pretty confident saying that uncensored next gen models becoming "open" would be a net negative for society.

I don't understand why no narrative regarding the risks of technology can land with the tech crowd until it's too late (hello, social media!)

mring336212• 4 hours ago

*ATTENTION*

This is a Big Green Flag for open-weight AI models.

zkmon2• 3 hours ago

Never thought China can force these two companies to run for the cover.

ex1fm3ta• 2 hours ago

On today's episode of "AI Frontier Labs running scams": Now that the narrative of "too dangerous to be released" is not longer working since Chinese gave it all away, they have to come up with another one. You had the first glimpse this week: "Chinese frontier labs distilled our models ..." => so it should be illegal to use them in America since it's similar to illegal copy.

imightbebatman• 39 minutes ago

In my opinion this is worth revolting about.

It is critically important to the future of your progeny, that 1-2 companies are not able to corner the AI landscape.

Open-source and open-weight or we throw ourselves on the machine worthy.

OpenAI and Anthropic unite against open-weight AI risks to their bottom line

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