Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has responded after Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang backed open-weight AI models through a public campaign supported by several major tech companies. The discussion started after Huang shared an open letter on X asking policymakers not to place restrictions on open-weight AI models. The letter was signed by companies including Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, Google, Hugging Face and Mistral. Following the campaign, there were claims that Anthropic supported limits on open-weight AI models. Amodei has rejected those claims in a detailed blog post, saying his company has never asked for such a ban.
Amodei made it clear that Anthropic does not support banning open-weight AI models. He wrote, “Anyone who has read my past writing should know that I don’t regard such bans as a useful measure, but let me state it clearly so that there is no doubt: Anthropic has never advocated for a ban on open-weights models.”
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He also said that open-weight AI models and concerns about Chinese AI should not be treated as the same issue. According to him, many open-weight models are useful for developers, researchers and businesses because they are widely available and only require computing power to run. He explained, “Open-weights models that don’t have dangerous capabilities are a public good: they don’t cost anything besides the compute needed to run them, and they provide value to businesses, developers, and researchers.”
Moreover, Amodei said he is worried about powerful AI systems being developed by authoritarian governments. He believes the biggest risk is that such governments could build AI models that become more advanced than those created in the US. He warned that these systems could help achieve “permanent military superiority” and increase control over citizens. While he said the Chinese Communist Party is not the only government he is concerned about, he described it as the “most capable.”
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Amodei also raised concerns about advanced AI being used to create biological threats. He said open-weight models could make these risks harder to manage because they cannot be easily monitored after they are released.
Instead of banning open AI models, Amodei said efforts should focus on reducing long-term risks. He suggested restricting China’s access to advanced AI chips and taking action against AI distillation, where one AI model learns by studying another model’s responses.
He explained, “I think this idea is actually close to a consensus: I have been heartened both that the Trump administration has moved in this direction in recent months, and by recent industry proposals that would apply such testing to the most capable models regardless of their country of origin or whether they are open or closed (while exempting less capable models, such as those from startups and academia, entirely).”
Amodei added that any testing system would need support from countries around the world to be effective. He said, “Note that to be effective, testing would need to be global, which means even the CCP would need to be on board. I think this may actually be possible: as I wrote in The Adolescence of Technology, limited cooperation around preventing AI biological weapons may be possible because it is in China’s interest too.”