Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said open-weight AI models can be a public good, but rejected claims that broader access to AI gives cyber defenders the upper hand against threat actors.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has sought to clarify the Claude-maker’s position on open-weight AI models after facing heat for being the lone major frontier AI company to not sign an open letter against the US government’s proposed curbs on some Chinese AI models.
After days of remaining conspicuously silent, Amodei said that Anthropic has never advocated for a ban on open-weight models as a means of protecting its business. He also said that such models – whose weights are freely available for developers to download, modify, and deploy on their own infrastructure – should be considered a public good provided they do not come with “dangerous capabilities”.
“They don’t cost anything besides the compute needed to run them, and they provide value to businesses, developers, and researchers,” Amodei wrote in a blog post on Monday, July 27. However, he stopped short of endorsing a letter penned by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang that urged policymakers not to impose broad “premature restrictions” on open-weight AI models.
The letter has since been signed by over two dozen companies, including Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Google, and SpaceX.
