An open letter to Dario: if you mean it, open the weights

This is incoherent. The argument seems to be that releasing the weights would slow the frontier labs from raising money, which would give them less money, which would slow progress on AI. It assumed all labs in the entire world agree to self-destruct this way and no new labs every start up to continue the work.

No, really:

> As you know, funding for frontier model development depends on valuations that assume the weights remain proprietary. By changing that assumption, we can reduce the money available for future training runs and slow progress at every lab at once, without a regulator deciding anything.

Which doesn’t even follow. It depends on every lab in the world agreeing to self-destruct their valuations and stop competing. That’s a much more impossible ask than anything Dario is asking for.

It also ignores the possibility of new labs starting up, using the open weights, and continuing exactly where the old labs left off.

I feel like I just read the ramblings of someone who got so excited about the headline that they didn’t take the time to think if their argument was sound.

The author put zero rational thought into this. If Anthropic is legally required to release the weights of any publicly accessible model, their logical response will just be to stop offering public models. Anthropic gets most of its revenue from enterprise agreements anyway. Providing public models or providing public access to their models is their secondary business. They can cut it off any time. Public access to their models (at subsidized rates) has caused so much indirect harm and financial cost to them that they're very well justified to stop providing access.

Anthropic has already shown they're very comfortable with holding models from the public. Mythos has been around for what, six months, and there's never been a public release. Only the select few blessed by Anthropic have access.

Forcing transparency on public models will just accelerate privatizing access to these models. You don't want to live in that world.

> Any AI model a company offers to the public has to be released as open weights.

The obvious outcome of this plan would be frontier models not being released at all to public It'd be an amazingly bad outcome. Models accessible to the public would stagnate (no capital, no access to frontier model tokens to distill from), while internal models would keep improving at their previous pace, use them in-house, and eventually eat the whole economy.

As much as I would love to be able to download Fable or Astra, this doesn't sound very convincing. If I were Dario I would've argued that slowing down without sharing weights is already possible without the disadvantages of sharing weights such as losing commercial incentives and potentially giving rogue actors unmonitored access to powerful models.

I am very skeptical of those 3 faces of American AI labs: Dario, Sam and Elon

Are they trying to stop everyone else from catching up with them or have they hit some kind of roadblock to improve models even further?

But IMO, they're not trying to help humanity

This made me do a triple take. Here is the proposed logic as I follow it:

> AI models are dangerous. They can help bad people do dangerous things. They may be capable of autonomously executing dangerous things. They may cause unwanted effects on the labour market.

> More capable AI models are more dangerous, but require more money to train.

> Money requires investors with expectations that the model will generate a profit over its operational lifetime.

> The operational lifetime value of a model is decreased if every model is public and can be hosted on any infrastructure.

> If investors see less operational lifetime value from model companies, model companies receive less capital and therefore train more capable models at a slower rate.

Follow-ons: There are immediate risks in releasing capable cyber models that can be ablated and then launch cyberattacks. Concentration of power moves immediately into the infrastructure layer for inference.

Models will be kept private for longer, if not indefinitely, given there is less incentive to release them publicly.

Enforcement globally will occur because accessing the lucrative US market means using an open source model.

The entire argument hinges on strict enforcement of this policy, when AI model routing can already be opaque.

It also hinges on investors being rational and expecting free cash flow from AI companies, rather than reaching a criticality threshold of model capability for recursive self-improvement internally and parlaying that into a global mega-corporation.

New labs and companies without infrastructure connections will no longer be able to raise money, given investor expectations, and therefore not be able to increment AI progress.

So a win for the infrastructure layer, models being kept private for longer, new labs being unable to compete, immediate risks in the rollout (I suppose could be mitigated by a staged rollout i.e. policy active in 2030, pricing effects now), enforcement being tricky, and in the event that foreign competitors lead the AI frontier and then start closing models, just conceding the market to them if US consumers and companies find workarounds to pay for foreign AI.

Dario has been pretty clear and consistent that:

1. AI model safety is the most important thing.

2. open weights decreases model safety

So it seems unlikely that this suggestion would be well-received

How about reading AGENTS.md...

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/6235

Not sure if I missed something but not sure what justification he gave that Open Weights would improve safety.

The counter argument from Anthropic is easy. If we open weights we can't detact it after being published / the guard rails that run on top of the models would be lost. Also abliteration would be much easier to do when a model's been publically release.

I'm not a fan of Anthropic but the argument in the article seems stupid.

"If you're so worried about acceleration, why don't you accelerationmaxx?" — OP

CEOs are motivated by money and power. They will say anything to get either. If they truly wanted to slow down research, they would spend lobby money on the candidates who could enact laws.

Instead, they are partnering with some of the most disliked companies (x, meta) to further their goals.

If you think the technology you're developing is extremely dangerous, release it to the public

This is a dumb argument. There are truly a few options, and I see at least two which are not discussed in the original post: banning the publishing of strong open weight models internationally, and nationalizing LLM companies.

I’m not saying I’m for these solution, I’m probably against, but if we are being serious why are we not discussing these options?

1) there would be no incentive to develop a new model (non-distilled) if it had to be released as open weights.

2) frontier models are way more dangerous if they are open. It’s opening Pandora’s box, there’s no going back once they are released if they are too dangerous.

I refuse to believe this is not some sort of marketing piece for author's company.

This is such a short-sighted take and author seems unaware of what damage can be done with powerful open weights models (intentional or not).

Jail-broken Fable level LLMs can mean constant hacking leading to public desertification of the web (best case). Now imagine state sponsored bio lab leaking strange viruses on yearly basis. We've seen enough evidence already, it is difficult for me to imagine an engineer living at the centre of the change is writing this piece.

It's a different question if you ask me if I trust a single company to police the technology. But with the current state of things, I unwillingly admit that no state entity can do a better job at the moment.

Releasing the weights for a 1T+ parameter model doesn't really help "the little guy" when it costs ~$50K per H200 and 8 of them aren't enough to run a single node.

Somehow this plan manages to lean into every single bad outcome

The concept is stupid and the rule as stated is stupid.

"Any AI model a company offers to the public has to be released as open weights."

OK great, that means no models released to the public, complete concentration of power.

Completely delusional. Step #1 is asking them to give away their product for free and stop raising money. Might as well ask for them to pay their customers since we are just saying stupid shit.

I feel at this stage it has become a west vs east race of domination. I don’t see them slowing down in the foreseeable future.

They are going for IPO, don't be naive

> You seem like a good and principled person, and you have a record of giving things up for what you believe.

i mean, 3 months ago i started to use AI for a project i'm working for around 6 years, full-time but calling a billionaire good and principled is a stretch and when you consider what made him rich, you sound like a 3 year-old kid trying persuade a mom or a dad to get lollipops when your are diabetic

LLMs it's already a economical treat for various fields/people, which not only funnels powers to the elite even more, it does through by violating copyright... everyone who uses this technology is dirt (that includes me and my little dreams of hopefully creating a company which employs minorities on the tech field) but the amount of greed from people who own these servers/GPUs is beyond this world - the world isn't GPLv3 licensed yet, an ethical society wouldn't find excuses to provide and sell LLMs to the masses

releasing the weights would be reckless and borderline malpractice

Anthropic will never open the weights, just like how no frontier lab will open up their training data.

What a dumb ask

Can we all play this game?

An open letter to Dario: if you mean it, give me a billion dollars!

Every time you, or any AI company releases a new frontier model, you have to give me a billion dollars. No strings attached. This will solve the danger of AI. Somehow.

So much communism is being unleashed lately on the news. First amendment provides for freedom from coerced speech.

Also: releasing just the weights is like releasing some source code without makefiles or configuration scripts. Sounds half-baked.

PS. The real problem with concentration of mega-models is the same old problem of temporary monopolies in emergent markets (IBM in 80s, Microsoft in 90s, Google Search in 2000s). Let's not worry too much about other peoples' money and use the amazing tools we have to solve our problems today.

FUD is nothing new in our industry.

The same playbook had been used, for eg. by Microsoft trying to fight Linux adoption and growth decades ago.

This is the *exact* same playbook used to instill fear and scare people into regulating and setting up barriers to open weight and open source model adoption which these companies know put their amortization and margins at serious risk. The outcome of this game is well known and well understood by this point. This FUD, even if it succeeds, only slows down, not stop, open source adoption. Eventually, open source always wins because people want something that they can control and manage costs.

Unless OpenAI, Anthropic, etc., will forever subsidize tokens, where it would never make sense for people, even after discounting 3rd Party/managed vs local/airgapped/self-host AI for risk, self-hosted AI, this FUD battle will eventually be lost, like it always has been. It is surprising to make this statement in late 2026, when OpenAI, Anthropic have not even IPO'd yet, and there is discussion in the streets that they'll IPO at trillions of dollars, something that is historically unthinkable, but history indicates otherwise: that in a decade or so, OpenAI and Anthropic are going to be footnotes in history and LLMs are going to be commodity with tokens selling all the way from unthinkably commodity to then-frontier intelligence prices.

We will tell those generations fond stories of how computers with hungry NVIDIA GPUs that could run quality language models in 2026 cost a month or two worth of a dev's salary, while the then-current generation phones that fit into a pocket has way more compute capability, were already AI native and were cheap as chips.

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"The meaning of ANTHROPIC is of or relating to human beings or the period of their existence on earth." Combine that with his end of humanity warning. The entire company is named after human extinction (a species he is not a part of). He is foreshadowing what he already knows to be true.