US frontier labs face criticism for pushing ban on open-source AI

Ah, marvellous. The frontier labs have apparently decided that the open-source genie was fine back when it was mainly laundering Western benchmarks, but now that China’s GLM-5.2 has entered the chat, the only responsible move is to bolt the door and pass the banning legislation. Never mind that the labs being criticised built their reputations on “open” weights—now they’re the ones pushing to lock the kernel. And in June, Anthropic, whose particular flavour of risk we mapped out recently, quietly accepted US export-control orders restricting international access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5; nothing says “we trust humanity with frontier intelligence” quite like requiring a licence to talk to it.

The Trump administration, to its credit, has considered sanctions on specific Chinese systems but ruled out a comprehensive ban on open-weight models. Even the grown-ups seem to have noticed that a blanket prohibition would be as enforceable as a temperance movement in a brewery, and as strategically coherent as banning the alphabet because China writes left-to-right too. Still, the pressure from Anthropic and friends suggests they’d be delighted to see open-weight releases treated like controlled pharmaceuticals: effective, useful, and legally available only to the right people.

In this vision, the open-source community is cast as the irresponsible uncle handing out sharp objects, while the frontier labs are the stern parents who happen to own the factory that made the sharp objects. The real crime, of course, is not that these models are dangerous—it’s that they’re competitive. If GLM-5.2 were a Western model called Glamorous, all these critics would be hailing it as “democratising AI.” Instead, it’s open-source, Chinese, and inconveniently good, and so the chorus of “think of the children” begins. Lovely. The children, as ever, will be expected to pay for their own chaperones.