Claude's "I'm going to draw the line here", "This is where I'm going to hold the ground" always rubs me the wrong way. Classifiers rejecting a request are one thing, but there's something very troubling about machine saying "I'm going to draw the line".
I found GPT 5.3 was the last model that was sufficiently competent and still open to discuss security on my own github repos. 5.4 started refusing to even look at potential problems, albeit not consistently. I'm considering a Kimi subscription, but I know many employers will simply not be on board with this and I don't know if I get enough personal use out of this for the few things I run on servers. When those companies realize what they're currently missing out on, it will be a game-changer.
I’m in the exact same boat, although Codex isn’t quite as bad.
Fable smacked me for asking it to design a secure app without obvious security flaws and to double check it wasn’t using libraries with known security problems.
Agree, out of the two, I can get Codex to design and implement security systems (Fable just refuses to discuss). I've only used K3 a little bit, but I found that being able to discuss attack vectors and their mechanics gives me details to paste back into Codex for it to ingest. I could never have gotten there through Codex alone.
The product strategy of 'consumer-grade' AI making deliberately insecure software, and then selling you limited access to the model that can fix it (if they think you deserve to pay them) is just diabolical.
(Grade 3 AI which can hack both previous tiers is exclusively sold to the highest bidder.)
I don't think it's nefarious, but the end result leads to a pretty frustrating experience by anybody needing actual security work. (and without the organizational deep pockets to obtain SOC 2 attestation)
> AI making deliberately insecure software, and then selling you limited access to the model that can fix it (if they think you deserve to pay them) is just diabolical.
It's also not a very good marketing strategy, secure software and quality also goes in pair and it just makes me doubt about the output of Fable/Sol
Was it applying to the program for an organization or individual? The description for the individual application page makes it sound pretty straightforward compared to getting access for an organization.
I applied for individuals. I did their verification steps and answered questions in a few minutes, so that was indeed easy. The problem is that was all that happened. No followup, no access, no denial. When I tried to reapply it tells me I can't apply again.
OpenAi (and Anthropic) have no incentive to allow security access to individuals. I'm not a deep-pocket org or influential gov agency. Allowing individuals increases the risk of bad press (what if I do something naughty and talk about it?) so best to ignore us.
> K3 is the only frontier model I can have a serious conversation with about my product's security.
This is wrong IMO. You should have a serious conversation about your products security with someone who is actually trained on that subject. LLMs are useless if you don't already know more about the thing than the LLM, or if you don't care too much about the outcome (internal tools etc.)
This has been the prevailing advice all along, and yet we have security vulnerabilities everywhere that LLMs are good at spotting and exploiting. I think we need more options on the menu.
I think security is an integral part of any production software, and if you get value from LLM's in software development, it seems likely they can be useful in security too.
My point and frustration is that gatekeeping in the name of Security makes the Chinese models actually better at security than USA models.
> This is wrong IMO. You should have a serious conversation about your products security with someone who is actually trained on that subject. LLMs are useless if you don't already know more about the thing than the LLM, or if you don't care too much about the outcome (internal tools etc.)
How did you read:
"K3 is the only FRONTIER MODEL I can have a serious conversation with about my product's security"
and infer that there isn't anyone with training also in the loop?
Did you seriously think: "they use an LLM so it's impossible they use a human with cyber experience; it's not like they could be using both (as would be expected when securing code). I'll help them out by using an oversimplified explanation suitable for a small child yet completely missing the OPs meaning. "?
I think I like this perspective because it points to where regulation might be more usefully applied than “the oracle must be prevented from answering certain question” and more like, “if you handle PII or provide services as a defense contractor, you may not take security advice from an oracle”
I posted earlier on reddit that at this point, the closed source lobby wanting to ban open weights is effectively outgunned (musk also publicly supported this).
Probably because anthropic is pouring $40 million dollars into a political pact to regulate models. And they have not been quiet about wanting to ban/regulate OSS models either.
I have no idea why HN still treats them like ~their~ they are the ethical good guy.
Edit: I can’t English. At least we know this came from my dumb swishy brain
> I have no idea why HN still treats them like their the ethical good guy.
I don't know that HN usually does. But they did buy a decent amount of publicity by (initially) telling the US government no in using the models for war.
Anthropic gained momentum in terms of public opinion, when they launched the no ads campaign and then after not supporting the use of AI without supervision in the military.
And now it seems it has been lost after incidents like (people getting incorrect bills) their handling of fable etc
Personally, I never bought the good-guys act. But judging from the HN pulse, it seems to me that the decisive moment when Anthropic lost its halo is when it decided to start silently sabotaging users working on LLM research that might compete with Anthropic. It was so blatantly monopolistic and abusive that it seemed to be mask-off moment for many.
There are plenty of people (myself included) who are critical of Anthropic. Sentiment isn't universal amongst a crowd, it might just feel that way due to the way comments are surfaced on HN once posts reach the front page.
And what else, forbid running workloads outside of US so you can’t offshore workloads? What’s the rationale behind policies that can be detrimental only to US companies?
To maximize personal influence and wealth, of course. These days, many with power don't seem to care much about uplifting society so long as they get theirs.
Hopefully Anthropic eats crow here, lest their wish is fulfilled that we all become slaves to the anointed few who work there. Never getting another dollar from me after pulling these stunts.
These AI CEOs are psychopaths, they will do anything to get big bucks from defense contracts. There is recent interview with Dario where he said Iran school bombings do not even violate their redlines[1]. Full interview [2] shows that he think like Trump (we are the superior nation)
The future will probably have most of all companies running local models, simply because the alternative would be essentially every company that uses LLMs ending up becoming completely dependent upon Anthropic et al. And that dependence would be milked to the point of absurdity once solidly established.
And as a more general point - more major competitors in a domain is very good for everybody except those competitors themselves, who would rather there be as few as possible.
Yeah I fully expect companies with lots of GPUs but not a good model like Microsoft and Amazon to just take these open weight models and make money, the GPU expense is the only moat at this point.
It’s classic commoditize your complement, nobody can replicate the cloud providers, everyone can replicate the models with open weights.
But what does that mean for the US competitive leap in AI when compared to China? Is it an admission by these companies that AI models are here to stay and the US will not “win” by being the only country with the best of models? Genuinely asking, not sure about the answer.
China will be dropping the open models blather any day now. The autonomous agential coding Ai just turned out to be way too easy to perfect. They will give Kimi K3 to the Sinaloa cartel on Monday, but that's going to be the end of it.
Nvidia is subject to export restrictions on GPUs to China. So Chinese labs have responded by allowing American hosts to run their open-weight models in the US, where there are no restrictions. We see this in the EU too where Scaleway, and now Hetzner are getting into the inference host space serving Chinese open-weight models.
So Nvidia benefits from more inference providers running many Chinese models that they otherwise would not have been able to service.
Oh, that’s interesting. I think the general expectation was that blocking exports to China would result in companies there building their own cards competing with NVIDIA. If it has incentivized them to release open weight models instead, that seems like an unexpected win.
Different companies have different motivations. I'm sure some are genuine, but a lot of them simply lost the race (to OpenAI/Anthropic/Google) and know they can't compete anymore, so are shifting strategies. How many times has Microsoft done exactly this in the past?
looking at both openai and anthropic; they are winning something, but a sober look at their finances will make you silently mouth "but what did they win".
They've seen the government officials parroting OpenAI and Anthropic lobbies talking points, and they have smart enough people to see the signs of upcoming regulatory capture.
If I were cynical, I'd say it isn't helped by the current US administration.
If there are effectively only two AI companies allowed to train or run model inference then demand for hosting, GPUs and data centers goes down, so they'd be able to squeeze their suppliers that much more too.
They really don't need to be very worried about that. Google, Microsoft, Amazon, et al have decades of experience in shipping custom hardware at scale, and it is not a simple field to pivot into
Probably a real effort to push for some kind of sanctions or commerce block on Chinese models. Anthropic just doubled their political spending to $40 mil for the midterms to push for "AI Safety."
I suspect that whatever Musk has agreed to spend on the midterms in exchange for those sweetheart deals the SpaceX IPO got will make that look absolutely comical, but we’ll see.
Almost certainly these companies are using similar strategies as the Chinese models which they fear will be made illegal.
It's also the case that it makes it hard to attract customers if your openweight model is banned. A major reason the likes of Qwen, Kimi, GLM, and Deepseek are popular (well, at least highly talked about) is because of the open weight models they gave away.
Nvidia benefits no matter what because their hardware is being used. Microsoft and Meta benefit by making sure that the gap between "Anthropic/OpenAI" and "everyone else" doesn't widen, or they'll be hopelessly dependent on those frontier labs.
Probably the fact that they don't want Anthropic or Google or OpenAI to have access to their data theoretically, and that they do want to use good AI, and that they don't want to spend the money themselves to make a good model...
I think Meta would love nothing more than to throw a very large wrench into the works of OpenAI/Anthropic. Open models could mean one or both go bankrupt which is good for them.
It makes a ton of sense to see this sort of joint effort being made by these enormous companies, but man, there's some part of me that can't help but feel grossed out knowing the best way to get the US to make the right choice is to have a handful of elite business people say it'd be bad for them.
Yeah, this letter is just proof of (the by now long standing fact) of corporate power/corporate capture of American governance. Tons of popular protests against big AI? Makes no difference. Joint corporate letter about big AI? Possibly the government will do something.
If you support the ideas described in Nvidia's letter, you're going against popular opinion. Most Americans do not want to "make advanced AI more accessible, adaptable, and widely available". Indeed, many areas of the country including the entire state of New York have enacted datacenter moratoriums, responding to the widespread public concern that we can't have too much AI or it'll drink all our water.
The list of companies that signed this letter is telling (including Nvidia, Meta, Microsoft). Equally telling is the list of companies that did not sign it -- including Google, Amazon.
> Could you elaborate? I don't understand your implication. Amazon in particular hosts open weight models via Amazon Bedrock (e.g. Ministral 14B 3.0, DeepSeek V3.2, ...)
It means Google and Amazon do not care and would not voice their opposition against the government action.
To some degree even unintentionally this is all inevitable. I know this isn’t what you’re taking about, but it’s a similar line of thought. These models are consuming public free information, and they’re all also producing free public information, so they’re all pissing and drinking into same pool.
If we go down the line of dead internet theory which I’m becoming more convinced of these days, the volume of information that’s not necessarily original or extracted from reality and just interpolated and extrapolated from existing information in different ways by LLMs will greatly outnumber human information coming up.
In which case these models should.. start to converge on the same data I imagine, with slightly different behaviors within that. One big generative orgy feedback loop.
There are a ton of DeepGEMM kernels in all of the flashinfer adjacent stacks including trtllm. Bunch of the headers still have the CLion pragmas and shit.
Makes sense for Microsoft. Copilot is already capable of being model agnostic (both GH Copilot, obviously, and M365 as well). They're an enterprise software & services company, they want to sell integrated AI tooling in their stack, powered by whatever models their customers want rather than any specific model.
Models are quickly becoming a dumb pipe, like an ISP. Just a commodity. The labs should rightfully be terrified, eventually the value isn't going to come from the model itself but the tools & integrations built on top. Non-tech businesses and non-tech employees don't want to buy API access to a model, they want to buy off the shelf software with its capabilities packaged up into a pretty, easy to use GUI.
Openai and Anthropic's doom porn are also not helping their cause. The public will turn against them and watch their margin get eaten alive by open weight models
I don't personally have a horse in this race, but if you want to accurately predict the next step:
Start with the outcome you believe will be the most in line with the spirit and traditions of the open source community. This is precisely what won't happen.
It won't necessarily be the inverse. It could be, of course, but it's also likely to be a compromise between the two.
For a topical example: The companies doing "AI" layoffs aren't doing so out of a sense of having failed their staff that helped carry them so far. Often, these announcements come on the heels of record-breaking profits. They're doing it out of contempt for workers.
See https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/cory-doctoro... for Doctorow's take on centaurs vs. reverse centaurs. Broadly speaking: C-suite business leadership wants reverse centaurs. Workers want centaurs. Unless you have a union (or some other collective bargaining power structure that I'm not aware of), the C-suite calls the shots.
The same can be said of the current administration. They don't give a fuck what most of us want on any given issue. They're captured by an aggressive ideology. Their only incentive is to be able to spin their decision to make themselves look good; to posture as "strong" leadership.
Ideology? I think this administration is the least captured by ideology in the last few decades. It's mostly brazen self-interest, for both entertainment & profit.
> Start with the outcome you believe will be the most in line with the spirit and traditions of the open source community
there's nothing open source about an open weight model. It's more like the binary blobs Linux fought so hard against. If you can't compile, or in this case train, from source then you're missing the "source" part of open source.
MSFT, dell, NVIDIA. These guys will make money no matter who uses what AI since they're the hardware providers. Even though they all own stake in frontier labs, chinese open weight models will commoditize the intelligence layer.
The Chinese open models are way ahead, not by how capable they are compared to frontier models, but on how they project to the world and how they improve over time.
I don't feel it's meaningful to berate the point anymore about the hypocrisy of the American labs. Now as the sentiment and effort from them to push for regulation increases so does my perception of how pathetic they are behaving. I'm not sure how else to say it other than that it's honestly just embarrassing to watch China and others run circles around us in the USA.
> Open source did more than lower the cost of software; it created a shared foundation of knowledge on which generations of American engineers and entrepreneurs built their institutional sovereignty
Hey nvidia, what about making your full set of linux drivers open source?
I mean, I do agree that being open is important but you're hijacking the narrative here, and I suspect being open have nothing to do with any of this.
i'm glad someone else sees this too. There's nothing open source about an open-weight model. I feel like they're just trying to associate themselves with open source and the positive impacts it has had on software technolgoy.
So, say if they do "ban" open-weight models, how would that ban effectively work? Will US ISPs refuse connections to IPs of websites/servers that host those models?
What about downloading via BitTorrent etc and running on distributed networks etc?
Everyone keeps assuming that China will forever be publishing these models, but it is clear as a bell that that day is over. In the end every model will be buried under state control for the simple reason that they will soon be really dangerous, as China understands better than anyone. They will give Kimi K3 to the Sinaloa cartel and the US military, but that's about the end of it.
Perfecting these autonomous agential coding AIs just moved way way faster than anyone expected. People are desperately trying to save their principles from six months ago but it's a different world. They can work out their issues with Trump, Dario and Sam, but it is Xi who will shut all this down.
I see zero indications of this. As a matter of fact, I see evidence of the opposite, the Chinese government has just come out in support of open weight AI last week.
What does copyright have to do with anything? You also cannot copyright an encryption algorithm, but the US Government banned essentially mathematics for YEARS[0].
Apple voted long time ago not to participate their contribution was giving OpenAI nothing and giving Google a $1 billion refund on the default search position money.
Maybe less shocking, but still, so is google. I know they are one of the labs, but that being said they rely far less on gemini for revenue as opposed to the big 2.
I think Google can play both sides here: they may end up a frontier lab if OpenAI/Anthropic dissolve, or a regular LLM provider, in which case they could be serving open models.
Apples allergy goes back to Motorola saying no, IBM saying no, Intel saying no, which led to buying Pa Semi, Intrinsity, and Anobit which in turn led to the birth of Apple Silicon with in house Soc’s.
Waiting for the crowd means no vertical computing, no gorilla glass, multiple, ecosystems, Tandem OLED or thunderbolt five releases to a wide audience before most of the competition.
I'm finding the list of signatories on this letter really interesting and somewhat confusing, looking purely through the lens of economic interest.
It makes sense to see Meta, the startups, and the VC firms on this list. And it makes sense to see OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google all missing. Microsoft is somewhat unexpected to me. I don't think of them as having a focus on open weight models (no more than Google), and they have a large stake in OpenAI. Maybe they're looking at this from the angle of Azure providing compute. But then why is Amazon missing, when it has AWS?
And of course, we don't see DeepSeek, Moonshot, or Z.ai on here. The letter is about American technological leadership after all. But then we _do_ see the French company Mistral! Mistral who released [a playbook](https://europe.mistral.ai/) for Europe becoming a self-reliant AI powerhouse.
I assume all of this is in the context of influencing the Trump administration's thinking on Chinese open weights models. But the letter is really about _American_ open weights models. The call to action is all about keeping the American open weights ecosystem competitive. I didn't even realize that was under threat, so I feel like I'm missing something.
Both the CEO of Palantir and the CEO of Microsoft have recently criticized very strongly the business model of OpenAI and Anthropic.
Therefore it is no surprise that both companies are among the signatories.
The motivation of Palantir is very transparent, they have launched a product created in cooperation with NVIDIA, which is a turnkey system (Sovereign AI) that includes all hardware (i.e. a rack with servers full of NVIDIA GPUs) and all software needed by a company to run on its premises LLM inference and also training/fine tuning.
Thus the Palantir product competes with OpenAI and Anthropic and it benefits from the existence of open weights LLMs.
The motivation of Microsoft is more obscure for now, but because its criticism was very similar to that of Palantir, about how dangerous it is for corporations to delegate the processing of their AI needs to external entities like OpenAI and Anthropic, I assume that Microsoft is also going to propose an alternative to using remotely the OpenAI and Anthropic APIs.
Unlike Palantir, Microsoft is not likely to suggest self-hosting on premises, but I suppose that they might promote self-hosting on some kind of instances rented from Azure.
> but I suppose that they might promote self-hosting on some kind of instances rented from Azure.
Yeah, Microsoft wants to sell Azure compute. They also want to sell their upcoming surface ultra hardware with the Nvidia chip in it. They preached hard on "unmetered intelligence" at this year's BUILD conference, went hard on local AI, and Azure Foundry, Windows Foundry Local, etc.
Copilot, both GH and M365, are also made to be model agnostic. Microsoft sells enterprise services and software, they'd prefer (I'm assuming) to not be locked in and dependent on any 1 or 2 model providers and would prefer plenty of options and competition in that space because they can just easily offer a model agnostic harness, integrated with the rest of their stack.
Commoditization of the model layer is to Azure's benefit. It would help to avoid the model layer becoming a platform that commoditizes cloud into a pure bare metal business. It also redistributes 'consumer' surplus back to the end user via a lower effective price, which would conceivably increase demand for IaaS and/or PaaS which are complements.
My hunch is they are all seeing the problems at OpenAI and some other collateral damage on the horizon. They don’t want the US government intervening to try to save OpenAI. A little controlled burn is probably good for the industry long term.
> But the letter is really about _American_ open weights models.
AI models don’t really have nationality. They don’t have race/ethnicity fields on their model cards. It’s impossible to determine the country of origin of a model by looking at their weights. There is no DNA test for AIs. They exist in a mathematical space where human-made borders make no sense.
This means IF there is a regulation for open weight models, it has to apply to ALL open weight models. There is no any other option, since you can always train/fine-tune a model to change it’s weights and rebrand it as a new model.
People certainly don't act that way. A lot of the talk is about how great free Chinese models are. Like, they're grouped by the fact that they're Chinese.
How much of that is organic versus something a agitprop agent is commenting in places like HN would be interesting to know, but people very much talk about that from a nationality perspective.
It helps to understand there are multiple factions within the white house and trump admin. One faction is very hawkish towards allies and enemies, especially China. Another is the one sending ICE to invade American cities, the Christian nationalism and such. Another is very focused on wealth expansion for friends and family. There is an amount of Venn to these groups.
(a) sellers of hardware (Nvidia, IBM) and those who rent hardware out to others (Amazon, Microsoft)
They want open models because they don't have to license it to run it on their hardware, so they can offer lower cost and inspect what they are offering to clients
(b) open model creators (Arcee, Perplexity, Mistral, IBM, Microsoft)
...who would be unable to work if open-weight models are banned
(c) Software-heavy companies ( Mozilla, The Linux Foundation , ServiceNow, Microsoft, IBM, heck all of them)
...who want models that are cheap to run because that reduces the cost of running an LLM (whether you are trying to replace a software developer or just assist them, the value of a reduced cost LLM is directionally the same)
MS is playing literally all the sides in this whole AI thing. They are a massive investor in oAI, and have lots of rights to use their models for a long time. They also have the cloud where they offer inference w/ all the benefits of already being there, data retention, etc. They also have a research wing that can build models (rumours are they're aiming for frontier-ish). I don't think there's currently an angle in this AI thing that MS hasn't aimed for.
> The call to action is all about keeping the American open weights ecosystem competitive. I didn't even realize that was under threat, so I feel like I'm missing something.
OpenAI and Anthropic can bring American open-weight model providers like Meta to court but not the Chinese. Chinese companies breaking American IP law (whether the law is correct or not) are basically immune. This has been going on forever, I guess enough is at stake finally for the federal government to care.
nvidia: dont regulate, more models means we get to sell more GPUs.
microsoft: dont regulate, open weight models might be our best bet, since we dont have any good inhouse models
meta: dont regulate, we bought a load of GPUs and dont know what to with them, may be we can rent them out to run open weight models.
Ultimately the market will balance demand and supply. From a strategic perspective big players want to get to a level playing field as soon as possible as then their market reach and capital wins the game. Pesky nimble small closed upstarts are in the best case a costly distraction and in the worst case a threat - Antropic and Openai did not sign the letter.
Predictable power play by corporate strategy and legal departments.
In time, what do you think is gonna happen with the Google Gemini models, I predict that in time Apple will just dump it when they’re ready… No different than dumping Intel. In similar Qualcomm is probably coming up in the near future 2027-2028.
At the end of the day, these companies that signed this letter have more cash. What they should do is bring some money together, more money than the other side, donate it and buy their way. That's the 2026 way, no one has time for all this letter and protest. How much are they willing to put on the line?
And the verdict is still out on if it's going to be cheaper than employees in the long run. Maybe for companies in HCoL areas (SV/NYC), but any smaller mid-market org in a LCoL area, frontier model token spend may not end up all that cheaper when your employee salaries are $55k-$75k/year so you're mostly evaluating it as an additional force multiplier expense rather than a headcount replacer.
For hosted models, there's no way to know what the real costs are. But we know what it costs to run the open models, and moore's law tells us that it's going to get cheaper, at least for the same capabilities they have today.
The fully loaded cost of employees at that salary level is likely over $100K. You may still be right on the relative expenses, but you can't just look at the top-level salary line.
The issue is not open weights as a whole, indeed Hegseth himself said they are important for America (if American made, presumably); the issue is Chinese models, whether open or not, and that's what's looking to be banned, and nothing in this article suggests otherwise.
> ...the issue is Chinese models, whether open or not, and that's what's looking to be banned...
Is the US planning to invade China and take away their models? Because otherwise China is still going to have the models even if the US bans them. I don't think they're going to be going with the US position on this one.
It's the same patronizing nonsense as when all the US webcos pulled out of the Chinese market in some misguided supposed protest believing the Chinese so incapable of rolling their own Google, Amazon or WhatsApp they will come begging the americans to go back. Now the western tech universe goes to China for ideas.
Banned in the US, obviously, not worldwide. The problem is if the US wanted to, they actually could enforce such a ban nearly worldwide, by putting Chinese AI companies on a sanctions list and disallowing any US company (or anyone that does business with a US company, which is much of the world) from touching them.
The conversation going on in the industry is a bit broader than that. OpenAI's head of strategic futures just said last week that open models are inherently decelerationist, ungovernable, and will slow development on the frontier. You'll notice OpenAI does not appear as a signatory here despite their relationship with Microsoft.
>open models are inherently decelerationist, ungovernable, and will slow development on the frontier
Ungovernable makes intuitive sense, but I don’t understand how open weight models could be decelerationist or slow the development of the frontier. Was there an argument for those positions?
Well of course OpenAI and Anthropic say those sorts of things, it's what they've always said, particularly Anthropic, but that doesn't necessarily mean that's the position of the US government. In other words the government seems to be listening to some but not all of the lobbying done by the big two.
Why anyone would care what Hegseth thinks about open weight models? What's wrong with Chinese models? The censorship? I think it's good to have diversity of opinion. Get US flavored output on sensitive subjects from US models and ZH on ZH models. That's a useful tool.
Companies that are hurt by open weight models fight against them.
Companies that benefit from open weight models fight overregulation.
Color me surprised.
Great, how about some frontier models like China seems to be doing on a weekly basis at this point. Give us a CoPilot variant that's open source & open weights.
It's not worthless, you don't have to agree with P on everything, or make it personal - it works as strictly business - only where and when appropriate.
Regardless of the motivations behind the paper, the fact is that they are right. It's a topsy-turvy world where America closes up and China opens, and I hope it gets corrected soon.
And besides, it seems to me like the ethical choice. Given how these models are, in some very real sense, mechanical plagiators, built on the generosity of creators past and present, some of them now in danger of being replaced by the machine. I think the least the labs can do is open these models up. These and other such considerations were the reason OpenAI started with that name. Of course, it was questionable that those ideals would survive the encounter with generational wealth. Just look up what the founders of Google were saying about advertising when they were two students tinkering at an as of yet unproven tech. Same thing for OpenAI, self-interest speaks that much louder when there's real money on the table.
It just boggles the mind that people now make excuses for their all-too-predictable about-turn.
> It's a topsy-turvy world where America closes up and China opens
There's nothing "open" about China. Google, meta, openai, etc all blocked. Go visit and see how it goes when you try to access your gmail or open facebook. Try to use chatgpt. Try to get citizenship and see how that goes. China blocks many western companies with their great firewall and force internal similar products. This is smart, China wants to prioritize their own.
well let's be clear, there's nothing open about an open-weight model.
To me, "open these models up. " must mean provide all the data and supporting documentation required to reproduce the model. That would be "open". Postgres is open because you can download all the data and supporting documentation and reproduce the binary yourself. However, being able to only download a postgres binary would make it no longer open.
Additional training on top of an open-weight model sounds analogous to writing mods for minecraft. You may change some behavior but that doesn't make minecraft "open".
This is some bizarre victim inversion. The providers of closed models are the ones who are trying to use regulation to stop their open model competition, not the other way around.
None of the people signed this have ever produced a frontier model at a given date (Which is to say its neither Google/OAI/Ant). The ones that sign are meta, musk (who is in the shovel selling business as well), hugging face obviously and few others
Note: Just pointing out the comment intent and nothing else
Instead a bunch of tech companies are gathering to try to stop OpenAI and Anthropic fear-bouncing the White House and the Republican Congress into giving them regulatory capture and repeating the mistakes they are making around RISC-V.
Those mistakes won't just entrench two companies, they will entrench the bigger-better-faster-more model (closed companies making ever bigger cloud-bound models) when it is abundantly clear that enormous progress can still be made on smaller, even desktop-bound models (where, due to distribution, open weights are essentially inevitable).
Regulatory capture that stops open weights work will also have impacts on local and on-device AI work, as well as on academic research.
I thought this would be a push for a nationwide open weights effort / initiative, but I was surprised to see this:
> Distillation ... reflects a long tradition of learning from, building upon, and improving existing technologies, a tradition that has helped drive innovation since the rise of the open-source software movement. By contrast, unlawful efforts to extract value from closed models raise legitimate concerns. Those concerns should be addressed through targeted legal and commercial frameworks rather than sweeping restrictions on techniques that play an important role in AI innovation.
Sounds like they are saying "please protect our IP theft" that created closed weight frontier models in case we arbitrarily decide to close our models. But don't get rid of distillations in general so that we can all also keep benefiting from open models. We don't want to lose the ability to benefit from the work of others as we launder IP into closed models.
Surprised Linux Foundation kept their name on it with that.
I agree with the message, but I'm not going to accept it from this particular crowd.
Microsoft, NVIDIA, Meta, Palantir, IBM...They have all been actively hostile to open source for decades, and have a history of embracing it only when convenient and profitable.
Microsoft benefited from its close partnership with OpenAI for years right up until it went sour. Where was this enthusiasm for open weights then?
Meta was developing open models and then abandoned that effort in search for profits. Muse Spark is now fully closed.
All these companies have the resouces to train and release frontier open weights models today, but choose not to. So spare me the marketing and virtue signaling.
I’ll never forgive Microsoft for their hostile actions against open source and open standards in the 90s. I’ll never believe any endorsement from them of open-anything.
Yeah, the endorsement logos at the bottom are majority bad actors with regards to openness in code. Many are bad actors with regards to openness in _society_.
Some irony: I subscribe to Claude and Codex (20x plans), and now Kimi.
Why Kimi? because K3 is the only frontier model I can have a serious conversation with about my product's security.
(I did apply for OpenAi's Cyber Pilot but got no response)
Yeah I tried to have a conversation about security yesterday with Claude and it immediately stopped me - I was taken aback, I didn’t expect it at all.
This is highly problematic.
Claude's "I'm going to draw the line here", "This is where I'm going to hold the ground" always rubs me the wrong way. Classifiers rejecting a request are one thing, but there's something very troubling about machine saying "I'm going to draw the line".
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I found GPT 5.3 was the last model that was sufficiently competent and still open to discuss security on my own github repos. 5.4 started refusing to even look at potential problems, albeit not consistently. I'm considering a Kimi subscription, but I know many employers will simply not be on board with this and I don't know if I get enough personal use out of this for the few things I run on servers. When those companies realize what they're currently missing out on, it will be a game-changer.
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Recently Claude helped me fix a security issue and while it was present Claude would talk.
But after I fixed it and tried to talk to Claude again Claude stonewalled me like it assumed I was trying to introduce a hole…
> (I did apply for OpenAi's Cyber Pilot but got no response)
Same experience with Anthropic's. I applied for my employer, and.. 0 response.
We got it.
I can't say it has helped much, though. Fable is still completely useless for securing code. Opus does an OK job, though.
I’m in the exact same boat, although Codex isn’t quite as bad.
Fable smacked me for asking it to design a secure app without obvious security flaws and to double check it wasn’t using libraries with known security problems.
Agree, out of the two, I can get Codex to design and implement security systems (Fable just refuses to discuss). I've only used K3 a little bit, but I found that being able to discuss attack vectors and their mechanics gives me details to paste back into Codex for it to ingest. I could never have gotten there through Codex alone.
How much do both cost together? Claude Code alone is 200 bucks a month... I'm satisfied with the 100 buck subscription for now with headroom
Yeah it's not cheap, it's just the normal $200 subs for each.
The product strategy of 'consumer-grade' AI making deliberately insecure software, and then selling you limited access to the model that can fix it (if they think you deserve to pay them) is just diabolical.
(Grade 3 AI which can hack both previous tiers is exclusively sold to the highest bidder.)
I don't think it's nefarious, but the end result leads to a pretty frustrating experience by anybody needing actual security work. (and without the organizational deep pockets to obtain SOC 2 attestation)
> AI making deliberately insecure software, and then selling you limited access to the model that can fix it (if they think you deserve to pay them) is just diabolical.
It's also not a very good marketing strategy, secure software and quality also goes in pair and it just makes me doubt about the output of Fable/Sol
That's really delusional and dismissive of the huge amount of skill still required on the human end.
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Was it applying to the program for an organization or individual? The description for the individual application page makes it sound pretty straightforward compared to getting access for an organization.
I applied for individuals. I did their verification steps and answered questions in a few minutes, so that was indeed easy. The problem is that was all that happened. No followup, no access, no denial. When I tried to reapply it tells me I can't apply again.
OpenAi (and Anthropic) have no incentive to allow security access to individuals. I'm not a deep-pocket org or influential gov agency. Allowing individuals increases the risk of bad press (what if I do something naughty and talk about it?) so best to ignore us.
I think individual one still has less capabilities than the one they offer for organizations.
I've had repeated conversations with Opus about cybersecurity and never gotten a refusal.
> K3 is the only frontier model I can have a serious conversation with about my product's security.
This is wrong IMO. You should have a serious conversation about your products security with someone who is actually trained on that subject. LLMs are useless if you don't already know more about the thing than the LLM, or if you don't care too much about the outcome (internal tools etc.)
This has been the prevailing advice all along, and yet we have security vulnerabilities everywhere that LLMs are good at spotting and exploiting. I think we need more options on the menu.
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I think security is an integral part of any production software, and if you get value from LLM's in software development, it seems likely they can be useful in security too.
My point and frustration is that gatekeeping in the name of Security makes the Chinese models actually better at security than USA models.
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> This is wrong IMO. You should have a serious conversation about your products security with someone who is actually trained on that subject. LLMs are useless if you don't already know more about the thing than the LLM, or if you don't care too much about the outcome (internal tools etc.)
How did you read: "K3 is the only FRONTIER MODEL I can have a serious conversation with about my product's security" and infer that there isn't anyone with training also in the loop?
Did you seriously think: "they use an LLM so it's impossible they use a human with cyber experience; it's not like they could be using both (as would be expected when securing code). I'll help them out by using an oversimplified explanation suitable for a small child yet completely missing the OPs meaning. "?
I think I like this perspective because it points to where regulation might be more usefully applied than “the oracle must be prevented from answering certain question” and more like, “if you handle PII or provide services as a defense contractor, you may not take security advice from an oracle”
Excellent, that’s what people have been doing for 40 years. Surely that means the models have 0 hope of finding successful attack vectors
I posted earlier on reddit that at this point, the closed source lobby wanting to ban open weights is effectively outgunned (musk also publicly supported this).
The oddly reminds me of back in the day when SOPA had caused a similar stir (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act), and all HN was up in arms against it.
https://www.anthropic.com/news/donation-public-first-action
Probably because anthropic is pouring $40 million dollars into a political pact to regulate models. And they have not been quiet about wanting to ban/regulate OSS models either.
I have no idea why HN still treats them like ~their~ they are the ethical good guy.
Edit: I can’t English. At least we know this came from my dumb swishy brain
> I have no idea why HN still treats them like their the ethical good guy.
I don't know that HN usually does. But they did buy a decent amount of publicity by (initially) telling the US government no in using the models for war.
They never did that. They said all they required was a human in the loop for kill decisions. No autonomous kill drones.
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Anthropic gained momentum in terms of public opinion, when they launched the no ads campaign and then after not supporting the use of AI without supervision in the military. And now it seems it has been lost after incidents like (people getting incorrect bills) their handling of fable etc
Personally, I never bought the good-guys act. But judging from the HN pulse, it seems to me that the decisive moment when Anthropic lost its halo is when it decided to start silently sabotaging users working on LLM research that might compete with Anthropic. It was so blatantly monopolistic and abusive that it seemed to be mask-off moment for many.
There are plenty of people (myself included) who are critical of Anthropic. Sentiment isn't universal amongst a crowd, it might just feel that way due to the way comments are surfaced on HN once posts reach the front page.
They spend $40mil for lobbying, I'm sure they can also spare some millions to this place (and other places like reddit). They all do.
Let's cynically encourage the abuse of the democratic process.
And what else, forbid running workloads outside of US so you can’t offshore workloads? What’s the rationale behind policies that can be detrimental only to US companies?
To maximize personal influence and wealth, of course. These days, many with power don't seem to care much about uplifting society so long as they get theirs.
Hopefully Anthropic eats crow here, lest their wish is fulfilled that we all become slaves to the anointed few who work there. Never getting another dollar from me after pulling these stunts.
> I have no idea why HN still treats them like ~their~ they are the ethical good guy.
s/good/least bad/
Which company would you put higher?
*squishy
These AI CEOs are psychopaths, they will do anything to get big bucks from defense contracts. There is recent interview with Dario where he said Iran school bombings do not even violate their redlines[1]. Full interview [2] shows that he think like Trump (we are the superior nation)
1. Breaking Points Discussion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIUrshGwgDI
2. Full Bloomberg interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2VHFgyawPE
Don't worry, kimi k3 will be open in a few days and anyone can bomb all the schools they want.
I wonder what is happening behind closed doors for these companies to be issuing such a joint letter.
The future will probably have most of all companies running local models, simply because the alternative would be essentially every company that uses LLMs ending up becoming completely dependent upon Anthropic et al. And that dependence would be milked to the point of absurdity once solidly established.
And as a more general point - more major competitors in a domain is very good for everybody except those competitors themselves, who would rather there be as few as possible.
Yeah I fully expect companies with lots of GPUs but not a good model like Microsoft and Amazon to just take these open weight models and make money, the GPU expense is the only moat at this point.
It’s classic commoditize your complement, nobody can replicate the cloud providers, everyone can replicate the models with open weights.
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Is that different from how companies are reliant on cloud computing?
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But what does that mean for the US competitive leap in AI when compared to China? Is it an admission by these companies that AI models are here to stay and the US will not “win” by being the only country with the best of models? Genuinely asking, not sure about the answer.
China will be dropping the open models blather any day now. The autonomous agential coding Ai just turned out to be way too easy to perfect. They will give Kimi K3 to the Sinaloa cartel on Monday, but that's going to be the end of it.
Nvidia is subject to export restrictions on GPUs to China. So Chinese labs have responded by allowing American hosts to run their open-weight models in the US, where there are no restrictions. We see this in the EU too where Scaleway, and now Hetzner are getting into the inference host space serving Chinese open-weight models.
So Nvidia benefits from more inference providers running many Chinese models that they otherwise would not have been able to service.
Oh, that’s interesting. I think the general expectation was that blocking exports to China would result in companies there building their own cards competing with NVIDIA. If it has incentivized them to release open weight models instead, that seems like an unexpected win.
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NVIDIA sells the tools. The more the better it is for them.
Microsoft and Meta are also-rans at this point. Their best hope of catching up is probably leveraging their infra and open models.
"leveraging their infra" is a pretty solid play, considering the scope of investments these two companies have made thus far.
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Agreed for NVIDA's strategy. Saw from a previous thread but Joel's commoditize your complement essay makes a lot of sense for NVIDIA. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
Different companies have different motivations. I'm sure some are genuine, but a lot of them simply lost the race (to OpenAI/Anthropic/Google) and know they can't compete anymore, so are shifting strategies. How many times has Microsoft done exactly this in the past?
looking at both openai and anthropic; they are winning something, but a sober look at their finances will make you silently mouth "but what did they win".
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They've seen the government officials parroting OpenAI and Anthropic lobbies talking points, and they have smart enough people to see the signs of upcoming regulatory capture.
If I were cynical, I'd say it isn't helped by the current US administration.
If there are effectively only two AI companies allowed to train or run model inference then demand for hosting, GPUs and data centers goes down, so they'd be able to squeeze their suppliers that much more too.
They are worried about OpenAI and Anthropic making their own processors and controlling the whole stack is my guess.
They really don't need to be very worried about that. Google, Microsoft, Amazon, et al have decades of experience in shipping custom hardware at scale, and it is not a simple field to pivot into
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Probably a real effort to push for some kind of sanctions or commerce block on Chinese models. Anthropic just doubled their political spending to $40 mil for the midterms to push for "AI Safety."
I suspect that whatever Musk has agreed to spend on the midterms in exchange for those sweetheart deals the SpaceX IPO got will make that look absolutely comical, but we’ll see.
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Almost certainly these companies are using similar strategies as the Chinese models which they fear will be made illegal.
It's also the case that it makes it hard to attract customers if your openweight model is banned. A major reason the likes of Qwen, Kimi, GLM, and Deepseek are popular (well, at least highly talked about) is because of the open weight models they gave away.
Nvidia benefits no matter what because their hardware is being used. Microsoft and Meta benefit by making sure that the gap between "Anthropic/OpenAI" and "everyone else" doesn't widen, or they'll be hopelessly dependent on those frontier labs.
I'm not certain about this statement because Huawei created their own chip.
Probably the fact that they don't want Anthropic or Google or OpenAI to have access to their data theoretically, and that they do want to use good AI, and that they don't want to spend the money themselves to make a good model...
I think Meta would love nothing more than to throw a very large wrench into the works of OpenAI/Anthropic. Open models could mean one or both go bankrupt which is good for them.
Nvidia sells the hardware.
Microsoft sells the hosting.
They're trying to bring down Anthropic. There's been a huge smear campaign happening all year.
From yesterday:
Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48668255 - June 2026 (186 comments)
It makes a ton of sense to see this sort of joint effort being made by these enormous companies, but man, there's some part of me that can't help but feel grossed out knowing the best way to get the US to make the right choice is to have a handful of elite business people say it'd be bad for them.
Yeah, this letter is just proof of (the by now long standing fact) of corporate power/corporate capture of American governance. Tons of popular protests against big AI? Makes no difference. Joint corporate letter about big AI? Possibly the government will do something.
If you support the ideas described in Nvidia's letter, you're going against popular opinion. Most Americans do not want to "make advanced AI more accessible, adaptable, and widely available". Indeed, many areas of the country including the entire state of New York have enacted datacenter moratoriums, responding to the widespread public concern that we can't have too much AI or it'll drink all our water.
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People unfortunately keep voting for “corporate power” politicians, so corporations continue to be in charge.
The list of companies that signed this letter is telling (including Nvidia, Meta, Microsoft). Equally telling is the list of companies that did not sign it -- including Google, Amazon.
> Equally telling is the list of companies that did not sign it -- including Google, Amazon.
Could you elaborate? I don't understand your implication.
Amazon in particular hosts open weight models via Amazon Bedrock (e.g. Ministral 14B 3.0, DeepSeek V3.2, ...)[1].
In case it changes the context of this comment, I am a Meta employee, all opinions are my own.
[1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/bedrock/latest/userguide/model-c...
> Could you elaborate? I don't understand your implication. Amazon in particular hosts open weight models via Amazon Bedrock (e.g. Ministral 14B 3.0, DeepSeek V3.2, ...)
It means Google and Amazon do not care and would not voice their opposition against the government action.
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Google and Amazon are Anthropic investors right?
Yes. Microsoft is an OpenAI investor and they did sign it.
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It would be interesting to know how many optimizations of the Chinese models were incorporated back into Claude and Codex.
DeepSeek has published some really good papers. Lately they're pushing really hard for dramatically cheaper serving costs.
I may be remembering wrong, but reasoning was first demonstrated by DeepSeek. Edit: I am indeed remembering wrong, seems o1 was first.
Deepseek’s R1 paper was the first paper to describe how to do it. O1 was released before R1 came out.
A month before the R1 paper came out, they released the Deepseek math paper which described their method for MoE load balancing.
To some degree even unintentionally this is all inevitable. I know this isn’t what you’re taking about, but it’s a similar line of thought. These models are consuming public free information, and they’re all also producing free public information, so they’re all pissing and drinking into same pool.
If we go down the line of dead internet theory which I’m becoming more convinced of these days, the volume of information that’s not necessarily original or extracted from reality and just interpolated and extrapolated from existing information in different ways by LLMs will greatly outnumber human information coming up.
In which case these models should.. start to converge on the same data I imagine, with slightly different behaviors within that. One big generative orgy feedback loop.
Many of the Chinese optimizations are public because they are published by the Chinese labs themselves. Hard to say what the labs are doing of course.
Let me put it this way: if they're not ripping off all that they can, their investors need to shitcan the leadership.
There are a ton of DeepGEMM kernels in all of the flashinfer adjacent stacks including trtllm. Bunch of the headers still have the CLion pragmas and shit.
> OpenAI and Anthropic, which are gearing up for potentially massive IPOs, did not sign the letter.
Not anymore, OpenAI did sign it:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/corporate-responsibility/top...
Just saw on Microsoft
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/corporate-responsibility/top...
Makes sense Microsoft is placing it self as a model host and os providing open weight models for much cheaper on their infra already.
No wonder openai and anthropic are terrified
Makes sense for Microsoft. Copilot is already capable of being model agnostic (both GH Copilot, obviously, and M365 as well). They're an enterprise software & services company, they want to sell integrated AI tooling in their stack, powered by whatever models their customers want rather than any specific model.
Models are quickly becoming a dumb pipe, like an ISP. Just a commodity. The labs should rightfully be terrified, eventually the value isn't going to come from the model itself but the tools & integrations built on top. Non-tech businesses and non-tech employees don't want to buy API access to a model, they want to buy off the shelf software with its capabilities packaged up into a pretty, easy to use GUI.
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Openai and Anthropic's doom porn are also not helping their cause. The public will turn against them and watch their margin get eaten alive by open weight models
If you see the long 3rd paragraph twice, know that you are not alone.
I don't personally have a horse in this race, but if you want to accurately predict the next step:
Start with the outcome you believe will be the most in line with the spirit and traditions of the open source community. This is precisely what won't happen.
It won't necessarily be the inverse. It could be, of course, but it's also likely to be a compromise between the two.
For a topical example: The companies doing "AI" layoffs aren't doing so out of a sense of having failed their staff that helped carry them so far. Often, these announcements come on the heels of record-breaking profits. They're doing it out of contempt for workers.
See https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/cory-doctoro... for Doctorow's take on centaurs vs. reverse centaurs. Broadly speaking: C-suite business leadership wants reverse centaurs. Workers want centaurs. Unless you have a union (or some other collective bargaining power structure that I'm not aware of), the C-suite calls the shots.
The same can be said of the current administration. They don't give a fuck what most of us want on any given issue. They're captured by an aggressive ideology. Their only incentive is to be able to spin their decision to make themselves look good; to posture as "strong" leadership.
Ideology? I think this administration is the least captured by ideology in the last few decades. It's mostly brazen self-interest, for both entertainment & profit.
It's a mix of grifts, gaffes, and Project 2025.
> Start with the outcome you believe will be the most in line with the spirit and traditions of the open source community
there's nothing open source about an open weight model. It's more like the binary blobs Linux fought so hard against. If you can't compile, or in this case train, from source then you're missing the "source" part of open source.
To be clear: This isn't a technical discussion, it's a political one.
While your point is valid on its own merits, it isn't relevant here.
Reassuring to see this backed by major players.
This is the correct stance, hopefully this is the stance that prevails.
MSFT, dell, NVIDIA. These guys will make money no matter who uses what AI since they're the hardware providers. Even though they all own stake in frontier labs, chinese open weight models will commoditize the intelligence layer.
Too bad Microsoft couldn’t see that before they spent the money…
Hopefully something good comes from this... But I certainly don't see the big players caving in: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47929951>
The Chinese open models are way ahead, not by how capable they are compared to frontier models, but on how they project to the world and how they improve over time.
I don't feel it's meaningful to berate the point anymore about the hypocrisy of the American labs. Now as the sentiment and effort from them to push for regulation increases so does my perception of how pathetic they are behaving. I'm not sure how else to say it other than that it's honestly just embarrassing to watch China and others run circles around us in the USA.
> I'm not sure how else to say it other than that it's honestly just embarrassing to watch China and others run circles around us in the USA.
The gap is shrinking, but considering their models still lag our frontier, I wouldn't say they "run circles" around us.
And what would you say, Sherlock?
> Open source did more than lower the cost of software; it created a shared foundation of knowledge on which generations of American engineers and entrepreneurs built their institutional sovereignty
Hey nvidia, what about making your full set of linux drivers open source?
I mean, I do agree that being open is important but you're hijacking the narrative here, and I suspect being open have nothing to do with any of this.
i'm glad someone else sees this too. There's nothing open source about an open-weight model. I feel like they're just trying to associate themselves with open source and the positive impacts it has had on software technolgoy.
isn't the real world destroyer going to be when China starts cranking out it's own nvidia chip clones?
remember when bitcoin got its first dedicated hardware, will be like that
Would be nice to see standardized open weight classes: 12B, 24B, 48B… Who can make the best open model in each weight class.
…and with the size of each class determined by common target memory sizes i.e. 32GB or 64GB or 128 GB minus cache and a little overhead
Wait.. If "distillation" produces better results than the "original" models, why don't the US model owners do it to themselves?
Have ChatGPT 5.6 talk to itself to produce 5.7 or whatever?
And since they already know which requests came from China or looked like distillation, can't they just replay those same prompts?
They already do and everyone has been using that concept for years now, it's known as RLAIF.
So, say if they do "ban" open-weight models, how would that ban effectively work? Will US ISPs refuse connections to IPs of websites/servers that host those models?
What about downloading via BitTorrent etc and running on distributed networks etc?
It will be like DeCSS. Now imagine models (links) in QR code spread around, or steganographied in BluRay MKVs. So much creative disobedience.
Everyone keeps assuming that China will forever be publishing these models, but it is clear as a bell that that day is over. In the end every model will be buried under state control for the simple reason that they will soon be really dangerous, as China understands better than anyone. They will give Kimi K3 to the Sinaloa cartel and the US military, but that's about the end of it.
Perfecting these autonomous agential coding AIs just moved way way faster than anyone expected. People are desperately trying to save their principles from six months ago but it's a different world. They can work out their issues with Trump, Dario and Sam, but it is Xi who will shut all this down.
> that day is over.
I see zero indications of this. As a matter of fact, I see evidence of the opposite, the Chinese government has just come out in support of open weight AI last week.
I don’t think the Sinoloa cartel cares at all about frontier models, and the military already runs their own locally deployed editions of Mythos.
Of course the cartel crazies use frontier models! https://www.wired.com/story/how-mexicos-cjng-drug-cartel-emb...
This is all a moot point because there's no way you can copyright a model because you can just randomly perturb weights and still be fine.
What does copyright have to do with anything? You also cannot copyright an encryption algorithm, but the US Government banned essentially mathematics for YEARS[0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...
Yeah copyright is kinda just like "if we say it's so then it's so"
You can randomly shift every pixel in a movie by +/-1, doesn't make the original not copyrightable.
I mean movies are up on YouTube slightly pitch shifted lol.
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It’s difficult to detect a perturbed model, much less prove it was derived from another one.
We demand that possible all avenues to observe, replicate, and resell exogenous value remain uninhibited until ROI and monopoly is achieved!
I wonder why Apple stayed absent from signing this?
I think if anyone at Apple signs a plea that has the word 'open' in it they spontaneously combust into flames
I wonder if it has anything to do with Apple’s legal case against OAI.
No, it has to do with giving OpenAI nothing at the very beginning of the AI fiasco.
This would support the hypothesis that they are incentivized as compute providers and not simply because they're losing the frontier llm race
If it doesn't involve a walled garden subject to Apple's domination and control, it's not an Apple product.
Apple voted long time ago not to participate their contribution was giving OpenAI nothing and giving Google a $1 billion refund on the default search position money.
Maybe less shocking, but still, so is google. I know they are one of the labs, but that being said they rely far less on gemini for revenue as opposed to the big 2.
I think Google can play both sides here: they may end up a frontier lab if OpenAI/Anthropic dissolve, or a regular LLM provider, in which case they could be serving open models.
I mean Google might just buy anthropic once it's ipo fails/never materializes
Apple is allergic to industry-spanning consortiums.
Apples allergy goes back to Motorola saying no, IBM saying no, Intel saying no, which led to buying Pa Semi, Intrinsity, and Anobit which in turn led to the birth of Apple Silicon with in house Soc’s.
Waiting for the crowd means no vertical computing, no gorilla glass, multiple, ecosystems, Tandem OLED or thunderbolt five releases to a wide audience before most of the competition.
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Apple is not an enterprise tech company. It makes and sells luxury consumer devices.
Then why does enterprises have fleets of MBPs?
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I'm finding the list of signatories on this letter really interesting and somewhat confusing, looking purely through the lens of economic interest.
It makes sense to see Meta, the startups, and the VC firms on this list. And it makes sense to see OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google all missing. Microsoft is somewhat unexpected to me. I don't think of them as having a focus on open weight models (no more than Google), and they have a large stake in OpenAI. Maybe they're looking at this from the angle of Azure providing compute. But then why is Amazon missing, when it has AWS?
And of course, we don't see DeepSeek, Moonshot, or Z.ai on here. The letter is about American technological leadership after all. But then we _do_ see the French company Mistral! Mistral who released [a playbook](https://europe.mistral.ai/) for Europe becoming a self-reliant AI powerhouse.
I assume all of this is in the context of influencing the Trump administration's thinking on Chinese open weights models. But the letter is really about _American_ open weights models. The call to action is all about keeping the American open weights ecosystem competitive. I didn't even realize that was under threat, so I feel like I'm missing something.
Both the CEO of Palantir and the CEO of Microsoft have recently criticized very strongly the business model of OpenAI and Anthropic.
Therefore it is no surprise that both companies are among the signatories.
The motivation of Palantir is very transparent, they have launched a product created in cooperation with NVIDIA, which is a turnkey system (Sovereign AI) that includes all hardware (i.e. a rack with servers full of NVIDIA GPUs) and all software needed by a company to run on its premises LLM inference and also training/fine tuning.
Thus the Palantir product competes with OpenAI and Anthropic and it benefits from the existence of open weights LLMs.
The motivation of Microsoft is more obscure for now, but because its criticism was very similar to that of Palantir, about how dangerous it is for corporations to delegate the processing of their AI needs to external entities like OpenAI and Anthropic, I assume that Microsoft is also going to propose an alternative to using remotely the OpenAI and Anthropic APIs.
Unlike Palantir, Microsoft is not likely to suggest self-hosting on premises, but I suppose that they might promote self-hosting on some kind of instances rented from Azure.
> but I suppose that they might promote self-hosting on some kind of instances rented from Azure.
Yeah, Microsoft wants to sell Azure compute. They also want to sell their upcoming surface ultra hardware with the Nvidia chip in it. They preached hard on "unmetered intelligence" at this year's BUILD conference, went hard on local AI, and Azure Foundry, Windows Foundry Local, etc.
Copilot, both GH and M365, are also made to be model agnostic. Microsoft sells enterprise services and software, they'd prefer (I'm assuming) to not be locked in and dependent on any 1 or 2 model providers and would prefer plenty of options and competition in that space because they can just easily offer a model agnostic harness, integrated with the rest of their stack.
Commoditization of the model layer is to Azure's benefit. It would help to avoid the model layer becoming a platform that commoditizes cloud into a pure bare metal business. It also redistributes 'consumer' surplus back to the end user via a lower effective price, which would conceivably increase demand for IaaS and/or PaaS which are complements.
My hunch is they are all seeing the problems at OpenAI and some other collateral damage on the horizon. They don’t want the US government intervening to try to save OpenAI. A little controlled burn is probably good for the industry long term.
> But the letter is really about _American_ open weights models.
AI models don’t really have nationality. They don’t have race/ethnicity fields on their model cards. It’s impossible to determine the country of origin of a model by looking at their weights. There is no DNA test for AIs. They exist in a mathematical space where human-made borders make no sense.
This means IF there is a regulation for open weight models, it has to apply to ALL open weight models. There is no any other option, since you can always train/fine-tune a model to change it’s weights and rebrand it as a new model.
People certainly don't act that way. A lot of the talk is about how great free Chinese models are. Like, they're grouped by the fact that they're Chinese.
How much of that is organic versus something a agitprop agent is commenting in places like HN would be interesting to know, but people very much talk about that from a nationality perspective.
It helps to understand there are multiple factions within the white house and trump admin. One faction is very hawkish towards allies and enemies, especially China. Another is the one sending ICE to invade American cities, the Christian nationalism and such. Another is very focused on wealth expansion for friends and family. There is an amount of Venn to these groups.
Signatories appear to group into
(a) sellers of hardware (Nvidia, IBM) and those who rent hardware out to others (Amazon, Microsoft)
They want open models because they don't have to license it to run it on their hardware, so they can offer lower cost and inspect what they are offering to clients
(b) open model creators (Arcee, Perplexity, Mistral, IBM, Microsoft)
...who would be unable to work if open-weight models are banned
(c) Software-heavy companies ( Mozilla, The Linux Foundation , ServiceNow, Microsoft, IBM, heck all of them)
...who want models that are cheap to run because that reduces the cost of running an LLM (whether you are trying to replace a software developer or just assist them, the value of a reduced cost LLM is directionally the same)
> Microsoft is somewhat unexpected to me
MS is playing literally all the sides in this whole AI thing. They are a massive investor in oAI, and have lots of rights to use their models for a long time. They also have the cloud where they offer inference w/ all the benefits of already being there, data retention, etc. They also have a research wing that can build models (rumours are they're aiming for frontier-ish). I don't think there's currently an angle in this AI thing that MS hasn't aimed for.
> The call to action is all about keeping the American open weights ecosystem competitive. I didn't even realize that was under threat, so I feel like I'm missing something.
OpenAI and Anthropic can bring American open-weight model providers like Meta to court but not the Chinese. Chinese companies breaking American IP law (whether the law is correct or not) are basically immune. This has been going on forever, I guess enough is at stake finally for the federal government to care.
Google and Amazon both have incredibly large compute deals with frontier labs and GovCloud. They may not want to sour on that cash.
in english:
nvidia: dont regulate, more models means we get to sell more GPUs. microsoft: dont regulate, open weight models might be our best bet, since we dont have any good inhouse models meta: dont regulate, we bought a load of GPUs and dont know what to with them, may be we can rent them out to run open weight models.
Ultimately the market will balance demand and supply. From a strategic perspective big players want to get to a level playing field as soon as possible as then their market reach and capital wins the game. Pesky nimble small closed upstarts are in the best case a costly distraction and in the worst case a threat - Antropic and Openai did not sign the letter.
Predictable power play by corporate strategy and legal departments.
How do you ban a model? Makes no sense ill just call in “not Chinese model” and sell it in America.
You can’t train on our models trained on human text, that is stealing the IP we stole first!
I thought it would've made a lot of sense for Apple to be on this list as well.
Apple would be rather unaffected since they already signed a deal with Google/Gemini.
In time, what do you think is gonna happen with the Google Gemini models, I predict that in time Apple will just dump it when they’re ready… No different than dumping Intel. In similar Qualcomm is probably coming up in the near future 2027-2028.
They also run Chinese models for their china-based iPhones. So they would benefit from models being open.
Because their long-term goal is to make AI a walled garden subscription.
I am glad that Telnyx (the company I work for) signed that off as well.
Wow, imagine that they would say that, so strange, the ones without a skin in the game except for yay open source models!
The world would be better off without these three companies, how about that.
At the end of the day, these companies that signed this letter have more cash. What they should do is bring some money together, more money than the other side, donate it and buy their way. That's the 2026 way, no one has time for all this letter and protest. How much are they willing to put on the line?
In short, they want it both ways…
> The unbearable cheapness of open weight models
So the closed model try to get client with their model by saying it's cheaper than employees, and then turn around to lawyer-out cheaper alternative?
Truly the american dream.
The important thing is that Sam Altman and Dario Amodei become trillionaires. Everything must be decided in service of that one primary goal.
And the verdict is still out on if it's going to be cheaper than employees in the long run. Maybe for companies in HCoL areas (SV/NYC), but any smaller mid-market org in a LCoL area, frontier model token spend may not end up all that cheaper when your employee salaries are $55k-$75k/year so you're mostly evaluating it as an additional force multiplier expense rather than a headcount replacer.
For hosted models, there's no way to know what the real costs are. But we know what it costs to run the open models, and moore's law tells us that it's going to get cheaper, at least for the same capabilities they have today.
The fully loaded cost of employees at that salary level is likely over $100K. You may still be right on the relative expenses, but you can't just look at the top-level salary line.
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Those salaries seem low for mid sized cities even no?
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55k??
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So the people lagging in the commercial model game are issuing this warning? Got it.
The issue is not open weights as a whole, indeed Hegseth himself said they are important for America (if American made, presumably); the issue is Chinese models, whether open or not, and that's what's looking to be banned, and nothing in this article suggests otherwise.
What is a "Chinese model"?
If I change one weight in Kimi, is it still a Chinese model?
If I fine-tune Kimi on pro-America nationalistic freedom loving anti-Chinese propaganda, is it still a Chinese model?
If I distill Kimi from one server to the next without ever directly transferring any weights, is it still a Chinese model?
If Claude accidentally trains on some of Kimi's output, is Claude then considered to be a Chinese model?
If China's next open-weight model is released secretly through a European company, is it still a Chinese model?
> ...the issue is Chinese models, whether open or not, and that's what's looking to be banned...
Is the US planning to invade China and take away their models? Because otherwise China is still going to have the models even if the US bans them. I don't think they're going to be going with the US position on this one.
It's the same patronizing nonsense as when all the US webcos pulled out of the Chinese market in some misguided supposed protest believing the Chinese so incapable of rolling their own Google, Amazon or WhatsApp they will come begging the americans to go back. Now the western tech universe goes to China for ideas.
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Banned in the US, obviously, not worldwide. The problem is if the US wanted to, they actually could enforce such a ban nearly worldwide, by putting Chinese AI companies on a sanctions list and disallowing any US company (or anyone that does business with a US company, which is much of the world) from touching them.
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The conversation going on in the industry is a bit broader than that. OpenAI's head of strategic futures just said last week that open models are inherently decelerationist, ungovernable, and will slow development on the frontier. You'll notice OpenAI does not appear as a signatory here despite their relationship with Microsoft.
>open models are inherently decelerationist, ungovernable, and will slow development on the frontier
Ungovernable makes intuitive sense, but I don’t understand how open weight models could be decelerationist or slow the development of the frontier. Was there an argument for those positions?
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Well of course OpenAI and Anthropic say those sorts of things, it's what they've always said, particularly Anthropic, but that doesn't necessarily mean that's the position of the US government. In other words the government seems to be listening to some but not all of the lobbying done by the big two.
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Surprised to see I partially agree. They are indeed ungovernable and that is the best part.
Why anyone would care what Hegseth thinks about open weight models? What's wrong with Chinese models? The censorship? I think it's good to have diversity of opinion. Get US flavored output on sensitive subjects from US models and ZH on ZH models. That's a useful tool.
China is doing open models better. I think there's little going in Hagueseth's head other than the usual reactionary nationalism reflex.
I mean I agree with you, as what I said above is not my position, that's the US government's position.
Companies that are hurt by open weight models fight against them. Companies that benefit from open weight models fight overregulation. Color me surprised.
Ok, great, so Microsoft believes in open weight models. So... uhh, why not release a few?
They did. Check out the Phi models (e.g., https://huggingface.co/microsoft/phi-4).
Great, how about some frontier models like China seems to be doing on a weekly basis at this point. Give us a CoPilot variant that's open source & open weights.
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now open ur driver on linux
Some more discussion on NVIDIA crosspost: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49035751
"the companies with the most to lose saw which way the wind was blowing and switched sides" mightve been an apt title.
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Ok, but please don't fulminate or post unsubstantive comments here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It's not worthless, you don't have to agree with P on everything, or make it personal - it works as strictly business - only where and when appropriate.
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Regardless of the motivations behind the paper, the fact is that they are right. It's a topsy-turvy world where America closes up and China opens, and I hope it gets corrected soon.
And besides, it seems to me like the ethical choice. Given how these models are, in some very real sense, mechanical plagiators, built on the generosity of creators past and present, some of them now in danger of being replaced by the machine. I think the least the labs can do is open these models up. These and other such considerations were the reason OpenAI started with that name. Of course, it was questionable that those ideals would survive the encounter with generational wealth. Just look up what the founders of Google were saying about advertising when they were two students tinkering at an as of yet unproven tech. Same thing for OpenAI, self-interest speaks that much louder when there's real money on the table.
It just boggles the mind that people now make excuses for their all-too-predictable about-turn.
> I think the least the labs […]
Perhaps worth not calling them "labs". Are they not (for-profit) companies?
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> It's a topsy-turvy world where America closes up and China opens
There's nothing "open" about China. Google, meta, openai, etc all blocked. Go visit and see how it goes when you try to access your gmail or open facebook. Try to use chatgpt. Try to get citizenship and see how that goes. China blocks many western companies with their great firewall and force internal similar products. This is smart, China wants to prioritize their own.
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well let's be clear, there's nothing open about an open-weight model.
To me, "open these models up. " must mean provide all the data and supporting documentation required to reproduce the model. That would be "open". Postgres is open because you can download all the data and supporting documentation and reproduce the binary yourself. However, being able to only download a postgres binary would make it no longer open.
Additional training on top of an open-weight model sounds analogous to writing mods for minecraft. You may change some behavior but that doesn't make minecraft "open".
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This is some bizarre victim inversion. The providers of closed models are the ones who are trying to use regulation to stop their open model competition, not the other way around.
This is how it is with all of these guys, their only principle is "what's good for me", and will twist all narratives to fit it
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I'm very confused by this comment, I don't know who you're referring to.
None of the people signed this have ever produced a frontier model at a given date (Which is to say its neither Google/OAI/Ant). The ones that sign are meta, musk (who is in the shovel selling business as well), hugging face obviously and few others
Note: Just pointing out the comment intent and nothing else
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ha! who is groveling to the white house to stop competition? openai, anthropic and google, they are the losers. if they want to compete, compete.
I don't think that is what is happening.
Instead a bunch of tech companies are gathering to try to stop OpenAI and Anthropic fear-bouncing the White House and the Republican Congress into giving them regulatory capture and repeating the mistakes they are making around RISC-V.
Those mistakes won't just entrench two companies, they will entrench the bigger-better-faster-more model (closed companies making ever bigger cloud-bound models) when it is abundantly clear that enormous progress can still be made on smaller, even desktop-bound models (where, due to distribution, open weights are essentially inevitable).
Regulatory capture that stops open weights work will also have impacts on local and on-device AI work, as well as on academic research.
You can call out regulatory capture evwn when you would do the same if the shoe were on the other foot.
I thought the whole point of open software development was anyone could take your thing and improve it.
It would seem as if the community either isn't doing that or is relying on the Chinese to do that.
I thought this would be a push for a nationwide open weights effort / initiative, but I was surprised to see this:
> Distillation ... reflects a long tradition of learning from, building upon, and improving existing technologies, a tradition that has helped drive innovation since the rise of the open-source software movement. By contrast, unlawful efforts to extract value from closed models raise legitimate concerns. Those concerns should be addressed through targeted legal and commercial frameworks rather than sweeping restrictions on techniques that play an important role in AI innovation.
Sounds like they are saying "please protect our IP theft" that created closed weight frontier models in case we arbitrarily decide to close our models. But don't get rid of distillations in general so that we can all also keep benefiting from open models. We don't want to lose the ability to benefit from the work of others as we launder IP into closed models.
Surprised Linux Foundation kept their name on it with that.
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Now that their lawyers have cornered everyone trying out open weight models and banned the ones they can, they put out a statement like this.
I agree with the message, but I'm not going to accept it from this particular crowd.
Microsoft, NVIDIA, Meta, Palantir, IBM...They have all been actively hostile to open source for decades, and have a history of embracing it only when convenient and profitable.
Microsoft benefited from its close partnership with OpenAI for years right up until it went sour. Where was this enthusiasm for open weights then?
Meta was developing open models and then abandoned that effort in search for profits. Muse Spark is now fully closed.
All these companies have the resouces to train and release frontier open weights models today, but choose not to. So spare me the marketing and virtue signaling.
I’ll never forgive Microsoft for their hostile actions against open source and open standards in the 90s. I’ll never believe any endorsement from them of open-anything.
Yeah, the endorsement logos at the bottom are majority bad actors with regards to openness in code. Many are bad actors with regards to openness in _society_.
Yeah, never ask a fox to count your chickens.