Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s CEO, wants to slow down AI. But not the training, mind you, but the dissemination, the distribution. They will keep having access to the best in class models, but they won’t ship them to the plebs. An “embedded evaluator” decides what is safe to release. If the model never ships, they are not even liable for not releasing it.
If you’d rather see this is a video, just click on this post cover.
If not, keep reading:
The context of the essay counts too. Two days before the essay, a former employee posts on Twitter that he quit over the dangers of AI. His new account’s first tweet does a few hundred million views. John Ternus got a million on day one. So this was definitely NOT organic traffic. Then mainstream media follows up with WSJ and CNN stepping in. And then the essay.
The second thing he states clearly in the essay is a crackdown on open-source models from “autocratic countries.” That means China, because those weights got really good.
He does not say what happens to American open source like Meta’s Muse, Nvidia’s Nemotran, Thinking Machines or Poolside. So the rule, as written, is: stop their open source, keep ours. That doesn’t sound like a safety framework. It sounds more like a market request. Like a monopoly.
Put the two together — train, don’t distribute, and close the open lane — and you get a small number of labs holding the weights, the eval stamp, and the contracts.
There is an IPO coming up and if their products can be outpaced at 95% less, then the IPO is basically void.
I don’t know if the listing happens.
But I do know I would rather keep the open source models I can actually inspect than wait for permission to use the ones I can’t.
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