Anthropic gets heat for being the only major AI lab not supporting open models - Business Insider

So Anthropic, the lab that's been solemnly warning us about AI apocalypse since before ChatGPT was a twinkle in Sam Altman's eye, is now the designated villain. Business Insider reports they're the only major frontier lab that hasn't signed the latest open letter demanding open-weight models. The timing is exquisite: China's Kimi K3 has just dropped its weights for all to enjoy, and Nvidia has launched its Open Secure AI Alliance—a group whose name alone is a masterpiece of doublespeak. One imagines Anthropic's Dario Amodei staring out the window, thinking 'we told you so' while everyone else queues up to sign.

The criticism is deliciously ironic, because the entire reason Anthropic exists—the 'C' stands for 'Constitutional AI,' for goodness sake—is to prevent the kind of unchecked model release that open-weight advocates champion. Yet now they're being shamed for not joining a chorus that, in their view, is essentially handing out loaded weapons at a county fair. The open letter presumably argues that openness fosters safety, a position that requires a fairly generous definition of both words. Meanwhile, Kimi K3 represents exactly the kind of capability leap that gives safety researchers nightmares: a powerful Chinese model with no oversight, now freely downloadable.

What we're watching is the collapse of any pretense of a unified AI community. Anthropic has staked its reputation on caution, and now it's being pilloried for it. The joke, of course, is that when the inevitable mishap occurs with a Kimi-derived model or some other open-weight Frankenstein, the same critics will demand the very regulations they're currently dismissing. But for now, the scandal is that one lab had the audacity to say no to a letter. Cheers to progress—same as it ever was.