Anthropic specifically is clearly trying to get the US government to ban open weight models for anticompetitive reasons. So making LLMs seem (or be!) dangerous aligns with their interests very well.
Yeah, maybe. But that doesn't quash gains by China's models. What's the endgame here? The USA "wins" and obliterates China? The ultimate goal seems to be stalemate, as with nuclear arms e.g.
This is just run-of-the-mill rent seeking behavior.
A huge chunk of their revenue comes from US-based enterprise customers. Earlier this year, in an effort to become profitable, they tried raising their rates. Those enterprise customers responded, in part, by ramping up efforts to migrate to open weight models. If those efforts are successful then OpenAI and Anthropic will lose their one remaining plausible path to profitability. The US banning open weight models arguably keeps that path open. I don't personally buy that story, but I do believe hedge funds and institutional investors would. That could be all that's needed for a successful IPO.
As for cybersecurity implications, long term impact on domestic AI industry or the US tech industry more broadly, geopolitics, etc., I don't think OpenAI's or Anthropic's leaders are any more worried about that than your average termite is about the structural integrity of the house it's eating.
OpenAI's leaked financials suggest about a $38bn loss last year. They recently claimed their ad business had an annualized run rate of $1bn. Annualized run rate is a bullshit, non-GAAP, obviously fudged number designed to impress people who've never heard of regression to the mean, but still, let's trust it for the sake of argument. And let's assume that "yesterday's weather" is a good enough estimate for how their overall finances are looking in 2026. That implies that all they need for profitability is to quickly grow their ad revenue by, say, 3,500 - 4,000%.
Ads in an LLM, such as nudging users to pick a certain solution or brand, could easily be orders of magnitude more effective than traditional banner ads. Certainly such numbers are possible if you design the product to fit. We have hardly even seen the beginning of that yet.
Combined with the terrible system prompts that brick usefulness, increased restrictions from the US model makers, and Chinese equivalents that are actually decent
It’s simply rent seeking, and there is no moat
Imo the US model makers were doomed by the US ecosystem itself
I think there are a lot of people who would pay very good money for access to mathematical and coding ability like OpenAI's systems have demonstrated. I wonder how much they're being paid by the USAF to try to unhork the F-35's avionics software, for instance.
> The US banning open weight models arguably keeps that path open.
Difficult to see how that could be implemented in practice. Ok, let's imagine only Anthropic and OpenAI hold a US government license to provide AI services in the US. But what would stop US companies from sending the data overseas for processing? Locking that down would require a huge paradigm shift, given how fast and loose they currently are with their (and especially customers') data.
Like I said in the very next two sentences, I don't believe it would actually work. But it doesn't need to. All they need to do is keep hedge fund managers distracted for long enough to successfully IPO.
This assumes that everyone doesn't reach "good enough" at some point. The best developed area here -- software -- seems to suggest a "good enough" plateau, if not an absolute plateau.
I don't think so - they could get a lot better, but it's going to take a lot of human brainpower to get there. They are barely adequate now, but their weaknesses are sold as intrinsic to the nature of the software in a way that mere civilians are too dumb to understand.
But imagine a world in which you could ask AI to write software to accomplish a particular task, and it understood completely what you meant, made tasteful choices, interviewed you as it went along to clarify things, and generated beautifully commented (maybe even Knuth-style literate) code that wasn't dogshit. Doesn't seem like an impossibility. What is annoying is that we're pretending like we have anything like that now.
Instead, there's this sort of science fiction pitch where we pretend like the LLM is just too damn logical to understand your sloppy human language. It's not logical, it's built on (human-generated) slop and generates slop. It's simply failing. We've come up with better ways to orient it towards big picture thinking and filling in outlines, but we don't know how to train it on big pictures.
Not that this would stop open models/harnesses from following (or even leading) frontier labs and destroying their insane valuations, but I don't think there's any evidence that a plateau has been reached. What we have is not great, and while a wall may have been hit on current approaches, the money, compute, and simply current progress in ideas has us in an environment where everything could change over the course of a crazy day. A single blog entry.
I do think that the frontier labs seem to have reached at least a temporary plateau. But if they figured out how to move past it and this new method didn't require a lot more compute, they'd still be screwed. Their only out is to pass the bag to the public, but Firmus, CharacterAI, CoreWeave...
Y'all are overthinking this: having successfully laundered IP, then successfully sold IP-laundering-as-a-service, then successfully laundered liability, they now want to sell liability-laundering-as-a-service.
> generated beautifully commented (maybe even Knuth-style literate) code that wasn't dogshit. Doesn't seem like an impossibility.
It seems closer to impossible than possible with the technology we have. Maybe something that isn't an LLM will come around that can do it, but even if that something else was capable of delivering perfect, ordered, maintainable, code without bugs and hallucinations it would have to be practically magical to understand completely what people mean when they talk about what they want because people are incapable of articulating what they want in a way that even other humans can understand.
For anything non-trivial, a technology capable of getting that information out of person without countless meetings would have managed to accomplish something far beyond what entire teams of humans are able to do today.
> It's not logical, it's built on (human-generated) slop and generates slop.
This is why if we haven't hit a plateau yet we very quickly will. All the good human generated slop has already been consumed and is being drowned out by vast amounts of the lossy, error filled, and highly concentrated slop AI produces from the human slop it was trained on.
Do you really think an LLM that spews out content based on statistical relationships is going to improve when it's been primarily trained on the slop of previous generations of LLMs? Hallucinations and errors will carry forward and spread like cancer. All the intelligence and creativity LLMs borrowed from human output will homogenize as the LLMs distill and then reiterate, effectively making bullet points out of bullet points, until their mimicry of intelligence becomes unintelligible.
They stole the collective data of humanity as a whole and now sell it back to you in a rent scheme. Open source will be starved of data and compute.
You're supposed to become dependent on that "service" and slave away at paying for it, while being able to earn anything only in conjunction with it.
Note how difficult it already is to get any up-to-date documentation on anything capable of generating actual market value. A monopoly on competency ensures maximal profits.
Open source already has the "the collective data of humanity as a whole". That's the LLM leg. Now focus on what they train their models on for RL. Do other models have less code for training coding? for math? Those are pretty much the only cases where we can have reliable validation. Then, what's the next step. So many branches: legal contracs? etc. So much more obscure detail, which is why (I'd guess) so many startups exist in these areas.
AGI, I think, is an illusion: you need a whole lot of specialized bots. Heck, when I query a bot wrt something I know nothing about, I'm blown away by its ability to inform me. But when I ask about something I DO know about, its answers are half-assed. Heck, even when it can access the internet, it avoids all the sites that have paywalls, so it sends me to little reddit to conversations that are entirely untrustworthy.
My 2c: Anthropic/OAI have taken 10s of billions of dollars of investment - and there needs to be a return on that investment at some point.
They make their money on token burn. They can’t do that if they’re competing with something that’s 80-90% as capable, but 1/10th of the cost (with the option of deploying it yourself for “free”).
The goal is personal wealth - and scaring nations to the point of diverting even more wealth towards your coffers because of a perceived existential risk.
Wealth accumulation via scare tactics is a classic move of defense contractors and AI firms are quite capable of running the same playbook.
The goal is power. Having 30 million of personal wealth is enough to retire in luxury and travel the world. They could all have this much right now. That's not what these types of people want.
Having 30 billion gives you the power to order legions of people around, buy and sell politicians, flood ad markets during elections, all with your couch cushion money. That's what motivates these types.
That reminds me of a different thesis on power as it relates to LLMs [0], and why rich investors might may be extra-interested in deploying them, as distinct from other kinds of AI:
> The fact that a theory-free AI might demand far more cash to accomplish a task (even a "solved" one like playing chess) than an expert would charge is beside the point. Billionaires have money, they don't have expertise. Theory-free inference is a bid to substitute one for the other: the beauty and terror of being able to manipulate the world without studying or understanding it is that it can be done with money alone. No experts needed.
> In a world in thrall to financial power, expertise is the only substantial form of power that can reliably contest the power of wealth. Moreover, expertise is the foundation of other forms of power, such as labor power, which is what we call it when experts band together to combat financial power.
> This is why AI bosses are so violently allergic to the idea of hybridizing AI with symbolic systems that operate on models of the world. These models of the world must be constructed by experts, and the power of expertise cannot be reliably commanded by the power of wealth.
Why does it always have to be some ulterior motive? Every. single. time. Anything a high-position person does - make a statement, post a blog, start a company, make a business decision... -, the reaction of the keyboard warriors is that it must be motivated by money, or power, or some need for destruction, and that anything that leaves their mouth is a poisonous lie.
I think this is a terrible property of humans, this hyper-skepticism, and that it has nothing to do with logic, nor deduction, nor reality.
Dario Amodei is a real person who has a family, a life, a profession. He worked hard to graduate from biophysics, he worked on ai for decades. He's very much a nerd. In interviews, he's very transparent. he left openai because of safety concerns, and everything he does and all his messaging EVER since is motivated by AI safety. His ultimate motivations are probably very messy and broad, some morally worse and some morally better, just like in all other humans.
You are going to stand here and, without flinching, without a single bit of shame, reduce him and others to wanting to "order legions of people around, buy and sell politicians, flood ad markets during elections" and "that's what motivates these people"?
Sorry but where did you leave your sense of nuance? What allows you to say this so confidently? Where is any proof?
This is simply absurd. Absolutely absurd, reductionist, and childish.
> I think this is a terrible property of humans, this hyper-skepticism, and that it has nothing to do with logic, nor deduction, nor reality.
You're not wrong, but it's balanced out by this other terrible property of humans, which is hyper-credulity.
> Dario Amodei is a real person who has a family, a life, a profession.
I never said power was all he cares about, but in general I believe you are what you do. Amodeo could drop it all right now, today and spend the rest of his life with his family, or nose deep in the research project he's the most passionate about. He's not doing that, instead he's spending the remaining irreplaceable moments of his life pursuing the accumulation of power.
> Amodeo could drop it all right now, today and spend the rest of his life with his family, or nose deep in the research project he's the most passionate about. He's not doing that, instead he's spending the remaining irreplaceable moments of his life pursuing the accumulation of power.
Again you go with this simplistic and reductionist view. This is an either-or fallacy.
I don't want to pursue this discussion any further, sorry. No offense to you. It just makes me too emotionally invested for some reason.
US companies which seek to do any business with the government will be forbidden from using free Chinese models.
As is a 2000$ gaming laptop can a run a basic llm which is probably good enough for most basic programming.
Most companies are going to be forced to use “safe” LLMs and pay by the token. Maybe for half a million Anthro will let you host on site, but even this will face usage fees or caps.
> All Information (Except Text) for H.R.10670 - China FIREWALL Act of 2026
> Official Title as Introduced
To prohibit Chinese AI models from being used on government-issued devices or software systems, to prohibit the procurement of any such models, and for other purposes.
It’s not too far fetched to see this expanded to government contractors or even other private businesses which handle sensitive material in the future.
Not likely. Will be treated like tiktok for government devices. There is no legal way to prevent private people and business from using open source software unless you label it like csam or something where just distributing the file is a felony.
If the US declares LLM models munitions then it makes it much more difficult to easily use them. Illegal use of weapons of war can get you banned from SWIFT.
Other than China the rest of the world has dick for capacity to run models. Even China is at 1/10th the US is and is at to stay for a considerable amount of time.
Before the tariff spree and general unpredictability the US could likely have muscled most of the rest of the world into following suit - now, not so much.
I somewhat disagree, there are some real arguments about making high end LLMs classified as a dangerous and restricted product that will apply to all nations. They may not agree to the US rules, but almost everywhere will have restrictions sooner or later.
Don't get me wrong, I want a world of open models, but I don't see us living in that world in our current trajectory.
Depends on how much of the world you see running on hacked copies of Windows and pirated versions of Photoshop, as there's already huggingbay.xyz. In a legit company you'd never run pirate Windows and Photoshop, because that's illegal, but to pretend half the world doesn't run on that would be ignorant. The same security risk is there with open models - if you're not looking at the code it generates, it could be putting in backdoors to your code and you'd never know, so no legit company is going to be running off some abliterated model they downloaded from huggingbay, but again, it would be naive to think that open models are going away.
Cryptography, DeCSS ... we have a long history of trying to block things like this and it simply not working.
There is a long, convoluted set of legal arguments that are going to make the weights of a model "facts", rather than "code" making it even harder to "ban". Furthermore having them not be "facts" is going to open up a whole other legal argument about what they are and what the attribution is.
I suspect that they are fishing for a case, so a judge can set some precedent.
You're going about this backwards. They don't have to ban models. They ban the consolidation of compute without a license. This will be far easier and already has legal precedent.
At all. It's easy for registered business to license compute for example, under laws like this. But if a user like you gets too much unlicenced you could be prosecuted under munitions laws.
With a stroke of a pen the us.gov could stop GPU sales tomorrow unless you register and keep track of your compute. Manufactures would have no problem integrated systems to monitor users cards if they get to keep access to the market.
I've been using only open weight models since February. My OSS coding agent harness ( https://fluximp.org ) only supports open weight model providers.
Not supporting closed models was initially an ideological choice, but it became a technical choice as the context management approach I've implemented requires the full reasoning to be available. All of the closed models are now keeping the full reasoning server side only.
Both have taken huge amounts of investment money, and those shareholders will come knocking for their returns at some point.
They make money on token use, but that’s hard to do when China is launching models that are 80-90% as capable, cost 1/10th, and can be deployed for “free”.
I imagine they’re also pissed that most of the Chinese models are distilled from their own (the irony being that they scraped the entire internet to train their own ones).
Why would anyone trust these rent seeking corporations? They are losing millions, they know their funds are at risk, Chinese models are catching up to them at lower costs and investors demand returns.
It only makes sense for them to go for regulatory capture. They'll probably advocate for severe handicaps on foreign and domestic models including open source (if not an outright ban).
Once they achieve monopoly, they can do as they please with little competition.
They might say that, but it's a bit of a fig leaf next to the implications of everything else they say. They incessantly complain about open weights models, framing them as dangerous and national security threats. The audience for national security rhetoric isn't HN or industry, it's government.
