China has been working hard to indigenize AI chip making since well before the October 2022 export controls. I don't think the controls had zero effect, but overall I think the effect is often very overstated, and anyway it's irreversible (there's no way China will stop its self-sufficiency efforts even if the AI chip ban is lifted; the CCP will always ensure there's a large enough domestic market carved out for every Huawei Ascend produced).
Cf. https://newsletter.decisiontreeresearch.com/p/how-much-did-u...
But thanks to financialization their incentives get in the way.
We de-facto settled on the answer being yes. These foundation models companies have access to such systems.
However, because the answer to the first question is yes, now we need to decide should everyone else be able to defend themselves with neural networks that are perhaps equally capable but are not sold by these foundation model companies as a product.
I think the answer to the second question has to be a yes, IMHO.
All the actual proposals that Dario Amodei has endorsed with regard to safety testing and so on have exempted smaller models. I don't think university labs or startups would ever be hit by any such regulation.
At some point open weight models will need to be restricted in some manner, likely multiple manners. We have rules about everything, you need a license to drive a car, your car must be roadworthy, your car can’t have certain modifications, you can’t drive over certain speeds, you can’t drive in certain areas at all, you have to wear a seatbelt etc. That’s one analogy amongst many, with the point being that regulation is a general public good that really does make the world a safer and better place.
Nobody should care about smaller local models that don’t have significant capabilities enough to be dangerous, and people should have the right to run them locally, privately and do whatever they do with them.
I don’t think that an AI monopoly or duopoly should be allowed to exist either, and I think it is possible to reach a reasonable set of compromises on each of these points, if the will exists and people can be convinced to be reasonable with one another. I think the will may not exist, and that reason is lacking in our discussions of reasoning machines, but I would like to be wrong about that.
it's a waste of time to take anything any of them say to heart, you should only read what they write to gauge what they are trying to signal.
> I don’t think that an AI monopoly or duopoly should be allowed to exist either
Monopolies have always been allowed to exist, even welcomed. People have gotten confused, but there is a big difference between a monopoly and an illegal monopoly. Deciding what should and shouldn’t be allowed to exist as determined by regulatory bodies and not consumers goes against democratic principles (though it is sometimes necessary, such as with drugs).
I don’t think I want to live in a world where police decides what brand of chips I can eat on the sole basis of the chips having gotten too popular. Do you?
After all, open models are not nearly as dangerous as rich companies.
Jul 31, 2026 · 5 minutes to read
Leaders are often conflicted people. Marcus Aurelius wrote about the common humanity of all rational beings in “Meditations” while commanding invasions. Abraham Lincoln thought of slavery as morally wrong, yet his “paramount object” of preserving the Union made him initially resist immediate abolition.
In an interview with The Economist last week, Elon Musk said he can go “from exhilaration to terror regarding AI” during a single day. Dario Amodei seems to be conflicted as well. In his recent memo on open-weight AI models, the best of which are currently trained in China, he wrote in bold lettering that he had never advocated for a ban on them, yet in the very next sentence began adding asterisks to that statement. The New York Times reported last week that Anthropic privately lobbied for increased restrictions on Chinese open-weight AI models.
Dario Amodei writes that he only considers open-weight AI models that “don’t have dangerous capabilities” a public good. Later in the memo, he supports mandatory, government-organized safety testing for all sufficiently capable models, arguing that open-weight models are intrinsically harder to make safe because their safeguards can be removed. Proprietary models are inherently safer in his telling because their use is monitored and access to them can be withdrawn at any time. This line of thinking suggests that open weights are acceptable provided they remain below some government-defined capability threshold. If they are too capable, their use should be monitored or restricted, and since their use can’t be monitored, they should be curtailed by law.
Anthropic sells controlled access to centrally hosted models. A regulatory system built around expensive pre-release evaluations, continuous usage monitoring, identity verification, and revocable access naturally favours large providers of proprietary models. Anthropic already possesses the compliance, legal, and evaluation infrastructure needed to satisfy such a regime. A university lab, startup, or community does not, even if they somehow manage to train a sufficiently capable model.
Moreover, nominally applying the same test to closed and open-weight models is not genuinely symmetrical. Anthropic can control Claude’s safeguards. An open model must effectively be evaluated under its worst plausible modification because users can work around its built-in restrictions. The open model therefore faces an inherently harder standard. This fits the definition of regulatory capture: regulating the industry around the incumbent’s operating model while describing the rules as neutral.
Dario Amodei pays little attention to some of the main advantages of open-weight models. Companies and institutions can reliably run their own AI without relying on a handful of vendors with volatile policies and less-than-predictable billing and access conditions. Researchers can inspect, study (or at least try to), and fine-tune them.
Protectionism, especially restrictions on imports, will always reduce competitiveness and harm the companies it aims to “protect” as well as the country in the long term. If the current U.S. administration heeds the advice of Anthropic’s chief, the result will be a reduction in the West’s global competitiveness in AI and another step in ceding our civilizational dominance in this emerging technology. China will continue releasing new open-weight models, causing developers and tooling to adapt to an open Chinese stack instead of the restrictive and less competitive American offering.
Furthermore, export controls, for which Dario Amodei openly advocates, are already prompting China to build its own chips. China is, of course, behind the West, but not as much as you may think. Instead of adopting a Western technology stack and relying on our technology to build its AI models, China will increasingly rely on its own chips, reducing Western leverage.
Another of Dario Amodei’s proposed “crackdowns” targets “industrial-scale distillation”. He concedes that “distillation does not allow the CCP to obtain equivalent or superior AI capabilities to the US”, but argues that what matters is that it is “backed by an authoritarian state seeking to overtake the US at the frontier”. I understand his frustration that Chinese labs may be capturing some of his profits by offering cheap distillations of Claude. However, I think he shouldn’t dress up that (serious) commercial concern as the grander claim that Chinese AI will overtake the US by means of distillation.
I think Dario Amodei is sincerely afraid of a possible future danger from AI. I agree that there should be an industry or government body that briefly evaluates AI models before release, perhaps based on what Demis Hassabis has recently suggested. I also think the ideals of trust and safety on which Anthropic was founded are not fully thought through or perhaps not truly valued enough, and are thus crumbling under the pressure of power-seeking opportunism. This is evident in the current position and in previous hypocritical incidents, such as advocating for restrictions on the release of powerful AI models and then complaining when their AI model’s release has been restricted, billing users extra without documentation for having HERMES.md in recent commits, or claiming users will receive “free credits” to hide a significant price hike (estimated at 25×), which seems to have been paused after public outrage over the decision.
Amodei does not need to advocate an explicit ban on open weights. It is enough to establish a regulatory system in which only centrally hosted, monitored, and revocable models can be considered safe. That system would preserve frontier AI for companies such as Anthropic while ensuring that everyone else can access it only on those companies’ terms.