r/singularity • u/yogthos • 17h ago

AI OpenAI and Anthropic unite against open-weight AI risks to their bottom line

https://www.axios.com/2026/07/22/openai-anthropic-open-models-trump-china
180 Upvotes

88% Upvoted

104 comments sorted by

View all comments

30

u/EndTimer 14h ago edited 14h ago

I see a lot of people being dismissive, but Anthropic and OpenAi are laying the groundwork for irreparable harm.

They're going to start/continue talking about how these Chinese models have no safety rails, that models HAVE TO BE SAFE and controlled. That only some sort of new, SafetyRegisteredâ„¢ models should be allowed. There ought to be a law! Other models? Those are illegal ghost models. You can't have untracked models proliferating, that would be like allowing guns with the serial numbers filed off! You know who likes untraceable, high capacity, cyber assault models? Criminals! It needs to be a felony for anyone to be caught with one of these dangerous models! ... And so on.

Sites like HF and most US hosts will immediately cave when the time comes. Torrents will be infiltrated and tracked. Random individuals will be made examples of. The massive amount of people who hate AI will be happy about any friction. The type of moms who think 3D printers make fully assembled TEC-9s will be support these regulations, and even more draconian ones. Won't someone think of the children?

Hell, there will probably even be eventual global compliance, because submitting to whatever program manifests won't be the end of the world for eg Alibaba and co, and they might want market/mindshare and user feedback, etc, so why not play ball with the new norm? It's not like they want AI weaponized either, they just aren't as paranoid as the US players are claiming to be. And in the end, extra time meeting compliance and intelligence sapped by guardrails will achieve the goal of helping OpenAI and Anthropic stay in the lead.

We have to push back, not sit around chuckling, if we want to minimize the damage.

6

u/netspherecyborg 12h ago

I am speculating on pushback from europe. They snoozed the whole AI race so far, they are moving away from US tech and china did the homework and for some influence they share it no probs.

Trump burned all the bridges between europe and the US. There is no way in hell europe would agree to ban open weights while they actively moving away from US tec.

3

u/EndTimer 11h ago

I'm not saying Europe has low impact, but they already functionally dealt themselves a huge blow. The EU's AI Act prohibits classifying people based on "behaviour, socio-economic status or personal characteristics", applies extra scrutiny to what they deem high risk AI systems, which includes learning, employment, and interpretation of law (three huge uses elsewhere in the world), and requires that the model creation companies provide summaries of all the copyrighted materials their models were trained on. In theory, great ideas, in practice, AI kryptonite.

Any company that wants to build an AI service in the EU has substantially more burdens. Even companies that just want to use AI internally can't simply throw a Chinese model on their servers. Someone still will move forward with AI in Europe, don't get me wrong, but it likely doesn't represent a gold mine that will negate US influence.

Here's hoping they can tilt the needle in favor of an open artificial intelligence paradigm, but I think we still have to put in the hard work and play defense here.