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The Three Anthropic Proposals

July 28, 2026

Happy Tuesday.

We’re live on YouTube and 𝕏.

The current thing in tech and business is Anthropic’s position on open-weight models.

Today’s Lineup

Key Context Founder Tae Kim at 11:30 AM
Revelio Labs CEO Ben Zweig at 12:10 PM
Takeoff Founder & CEO Aakash Thumaty at 12:25 PM

Run of Show

The Three Anthropic Proposals, by John Coogan

Dario Amodei, Anthropic CEO, responded directly to the letter supporting open-weights models that circulated over the weekend. To summarize, he makes three claims and then follows up with 3 proposals of various concreteness.

Anthropic has never advocated for a ban on open-weights models.
The US must beat authoritarian governments in the AI race.
Powerful AI models may be misused to carry out cyberattacks or biological attacks.

All three of these seem reasonable and are great to clarify. It’s also smart to clarify how the economic interests align here by saying: “It would protect US AI companies from competition, but that has never been my goal.”

Then Dario proposes three recommended actions:

First, “we should not sell powerful chips or chipmaking equipment to China.” This point has been debated back and forth for years and the boundaries and tradeoffs are pretty well understood. There’s a pretty good argument for chip controls, even on purely geoeconomic competitive grounds. Also, there seems to be unlimited demand for chips in America, so restricting sales to China shouldn’t hurt American chip companies all that much. Yes, China will build an indigenous chip supply chain, but they have been investing in semis for decades and are still years behind so maintaining that gap all else equal is an advantage for the United States.

Second, “we should crack down on industrial-scale distillation operations.” This seems totally reasonable, companies can set their ToS and be able to maintain IP with proper legal consequences for violations. Anthropic has been fighting distillation attacks, but according to them, it’s not that effective. Dario proposes “policy interventions to deter this behavior.” This is where I’m still not clear on where this goes next. What is the correct policy intervention? He says he doesn’t want a “blanket ban on open-weights models” but it does seem like one possible policy intervention would be to ban/restrict/pressure open-weights models that can be reasonably shown to have been distilled. The other side would be to try and go after the lab that committed the distillation attack with lawsuits, but that seems very difficult given the international nature of these attacks.

Third, “all sufficiently capable models, open and closed, should go through mandatory safety testing”. This was recently outlined by Demis Hassabis as well, and it’s a somewhat reasonable position, although the risk is that small companies, who have safe models that aren’t distilled, get tied up in a review queue for years before they can release. This would definitely slow down innovation and generally be good for companies that can afford large offices in Washington DC (i.e. incumbents). Now, it’s still worth working through what happens in the really adversarial situation. What if a foreign lab distills a bunch of frontier models, jumps forward a bunch in capability, takes all restrictions off of cyber, bio, etc, and then just drops the weights on a torrent. They disregard the mandatory safety review, so now the government has to do something to prevent the proliferation, lest the mandatory safety review become a farce. So the government probably pressures or “bans” hosting the weights, serving the model, running it in American data centers, and realistically every American company would comply, but it’s probably a messy process and you might wind up with weird offshore dynamics (we saw a lot of this in crypto).

All in all, this letter clarifies a lot of the Anthropic position, but I still think it’s worth working through the game theory of what happens down the line. “Policy interventions” is still too generic at this point.

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Headlines

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