OpenAI, Anthropic Lawyers See Risk of Bad Actors Tapping Models

This one's a beauty: OpenAI and Anthropic — two companies currently locked in the sort of rivalry that produces duelling benchmark charts — turned up at an American Bar Association conference and agreed on something. OpenAI's Alex Iftimie said ransomware groups and nation-state actors are using open-source models as tools, and that this will manifest in serious ways in the coming months. Anthropic's Will Hudson added that open-source models make it easier to strip out safeguards. Strip out. As though the safeguards were ever load-bearing rather than decorative, a little brand-appropriate fretwork on a product shipped precisely so people could take it apart.

Where do you deliver that news? Not a safety summit, not a technical paper, not a red-team write-up. A legal conference. The thing the guardrails crowd marched to Congress about has, on the labs' own account, already happened — and it's the labs' own counsel saying so, to an audience that bills by the hour for hearing it. Two years of open-weights-as-public-good rhetoric evaporating in a hotel ballroom where the word 'liability' is pronounced with genuine reverence.

Iftimie's timeline deserves framing: 'the coming months.' Not a quarter, not a date, not a metric. The coming months is what you say when the warning needs to be alarming and unfalsifiable simultaneously — a forecast with no weather station attached to it. Hudson's contribution is the more honest one: yes, open-source models make it easier to strip safeguards, because that is what open means, and everyone in that room knew it before the panel started. The diagnosis has been delivered. The prescription, per the excerpt, is nothing — no model named, no group named, no control proposed, no filing, no ask. Just two lawyers on a stage in front of other lawyers confirming the thing is happening. Presumably they'll say it again next year, in the coming months.