r/LocalLLaMA · July 28, 2026 · 1 min read

Why Anthropic's battle is meant to poison the wells of open weight models, in 3 steps.

Mirrored from r/LocalLLaMA for archival readability. Support the source by reading on the original site.

It doesn't solve any problems. Just a few paragraphs above, he says he fears that authoritarian states (he names China, and possibly others) can use their models to do evil stuff. And surely enough, malicious actors creating a model for themselves and for the EVILZ aren't going to subject it to safety controls (or even release it publicly).
It just sets a bureaucratic wall against AI models that can be made as high as preferred. "Oh, this model says Israel is bad; this is anti-Semitic. No safety here." "Oh, this other one, yes, can stop cyberattacks, but can also be used to launch some" (see the recent episode that involved OpenAI and Hugging Face and the fact that they used open models to defend their site). Open-source models will be delayed and made hard to use for companies and private individuals, just for "reasons."
And what is even more important to me: open-weights models will need to be depowered at the root, because the guardrails for open models need to be in the model itself. As Stable Diffusion taught us, when you try to sanitize stuff, you end up poisoning your own model and making it stupid. At the same time, closed models can have their guardrails implemented as a filter that decides if a request is acceptable or not. That is way easier to implement and way less prone to breaking the model itself. So the proposal is aiming to kill open weights models, just with extra logical steps.

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