Anthropic's Dario Amodei responds: doesn't oppose open-weight models, but fears Chinese AI

Anthropic founder and CEO Dario Amodei responded to industry speculation that his company supports banning open-weight Chinese models, stating clearly that Anthropic has never advocated for such a ban. His response followed an open letter from Nvidia, Meta, Mistral, and others urging policymakers against premature restrictions on open-weight models. Amodei views open-weight models without dangerous capabilities as a public good, but fears that authoritarian governments, particularly China, could build more powerful models for military superiority or repression. He supports restricting China's access to advanced chips, cracking down on model distillation (a method of IP theft), and creating a global model safety testing organization that includes China, believing limited cooperation on preventing AI biological weapons may be possible.