Probably because anthropic is pouring $40 million dollars into a political pact to regulate models. And they have not been quiet about wanting to ban/regulate OSS models either.
I have no idea why HN still treats them like ~their~ they are the ethical good guy.
Edit: I can’t English. At least we know this came from my dumb swishy brain
> I have no idea why HN still treats them like their the ethical good guy.
I don't know that HN usually does. But they did buy a decent amount of publicity by (initially) telling the US government no in using the models for war.
What does that have to do with LLMs hosted by Anthropic. They didn't say the Dept of War couldn't make kill bots. They said no using Claude to make kill decisions. A quadcopter drone running on a Raspberry Pi isn't running an Anthropic model locally.
The product strategy of 'consumer-grade' AI making deliberately insecure software, and then selling you limited access to the model that can fix it (if they think you deserve to pay them) is just diabolical.
(Grade 3 AI which can hack both previous tiers is exclusively sold to the highest bidder.)
I don't think it's nefarious, but the end result leads to a pretty frustrating experience by anybody needing actual security work. (and without the organizational deep pockets to obtain SOC 2 attestation)
> AI making deliberately insecure software, and then selling you limited access to the model that can fix it (if they think you deserve to pay them) is just diabolical.
It's also not a very good marketing strategy, secure software and quality also goes in pair and it just makes me doubt about the output of Fable/Sol
> K3 is the only frontier model I can have a serious conversation with about my product's security.
This is wrong IMO. You should have a serious conversation about your products security with someone who is actually trained on that subject. LLMs are useless if you don't already know more about the thing than the LLM, or if you don't care too much about the outcome (internal tools etc.)
This has been the prevailing advice all along, and yet we have security vulnerabilities everywhere that LLMs are good at spotting and exploiting. I think we need more options on the menu.
I think security is an integral part of any production software, and if you get value from LLM's in software development, it seems likely they can be useful in security too.
My point and frustration is that gatekeeping in the name of Security makes the Chinese models actually better at security than USA models.
I think I like this perspective because it points to where regulation might be more usefully applied than “the oracle must be prevented from answering certain question” and more like, “if you handle PII or provide services as a defense contractor, you may not take security advice from an oracle”
I posted earlier on reddit that at this point, the closed source lobby wanting to ban open weights is effectively outgunned (musk also publicly supported this).
The future will probably have most of all companies running local models, simply because the alternative would be essentially every company that uses LLMs ending up becoming completely dependent upon Anthropic et al. And that dependence would be milked to the point of absurdity once solidly established.
And as a more general point - more major competitors in a domain is very good for everybody except those competitors themselves, who would rather there be as few as possible.
Yeah I fully expect companies with lots of GPUs but not a good model like Microsoft and Amazon to just take these open weight models and make money, the GPU expense is the only moat at this point.
It’s classic commoditize your complement, nobody can replicate the cloud providers, everyone can replicate the models with open weights.
Not entirely, if models become commodity, then Microsoft's play as an infrastructure & enterprise apps company is the better bet. They don't need to make profitable mass-market AI models, they just need the best tooling on top of any model their customers pick, remaining fully model agnostic.
"AI Product" doesn't necessarily mean "We sell API access to a our models." Ton of companies out there itching to buy a commercial off the shelf product to deliver whatever AI capabilities they need packaged in a nice GUI, with enterprise governance controls, without needing a dev team/team of engineers to integrate it or develop harnesses, etc.
Buy it->have IT click a few buttons in an admin console->Deploy and have it be immediately useful is the play.
AI services becoming a commodity by definition means that the price will hover around cost to operate. That's just what commoditization means in tech. Free, as in Google creating a free browser for no profit in order to increase the size of their ad market.
The entire justification for the AI buildout, and the valuations of all the major AI labs, is that the service will be priced at some significant fraction of the knowledge work it's replacing. If you think it will become commoditized in the future, you are saying these companies are significantly overvalued at present.
> you are saying these companies are significantly overvalued at present.
I do lean toward them being significantly overvalued at present. OpenAI & Anthropic's valuations assume high margin product pricing on raw intelligence itself. Even if assume the labs will start charging value-based pricing, enterprise buyers will pay that pricing to whoever saves them engineering hours to make any cheap model work inside their compliance boundary, no guarantee that's going to be OpenAI or Anthropic.
Microsoft wins either way, proprietary, expensive models or cheap commoditized inference, because they monetize the workflow on top, not the raw intelligence. I also happen to think it's everything "on top" where a lot of value lives. Plenty of non-tech enterprises and companies out there itching for a ClickOps style AI product, especially if they don't have an engineering team, that they can buy off the shelf, meets all the compliance checkboxes, and does what they need without having to build the agents and harnesses themselves with the APIs.
Nvidia is subject to export restrictions on GPUs to China. So Chinese labs have responded by allowing American hosts to run their open-weight models in the US, where there are no restrictions. We see this in the EU too where Scaleway, and now Hetzner are getting into the inference host space serving Chinese open-weight models.
So Nvidia benefits from more inference providers running many Chinese models that they otherwise would not have been able to service.
Oh, that’s interesting. I think the general expectation was that blocking exports to China would result in companies there building their own cards competing with NVIDIA. If it has incentivized them to release open weight models instead, that seems like an unexpected win.
It's all things at once. Perhaps it's incentivized the open weight strategy. It's also prompted Huawei to ramp up production of AI chips to try and create a local competitor to Nvidia. It's also also created a grey market for Nvidia chips within China.
They've seen the government officials parroting OpenAI and Anthropic lobbies talking points, and they have smart enough people to see the signs of upcoming regulatory capture.
If I were cynical, I'd say it isn't helped by the current US administration.
Different companies have different motivations. I'm sure some are genuine, but a lot of them simply lost the race (to OpenAI/Anthropic/Google) and know they can't compete anymore, so are shifting strategies. How many times has Microsoft done exactly this in the past?
looking at both openai and anthropic; they are winning something, but a sober look at their finances will make you silently mouth "but what did they win".
If there are effectively only two AI companies allowed to train or run model inference then demand for hosting, GPUs and data centers goes down, so they'd be able to squeeze their suppliers that much more too.
Almost certainly these companies are using similar strategies as the Chinese models which they fear will be made illegal.
It's also the case that it makes it hard to attract customers if your openweight model is banned. A major reason the likes of Qwen, Kimi, GLM, and Deepseek are popular (well, at least highly talked about) is because of the open weight models they gave away.
They really don't need to be very worried about that. Google, Microsoft, Amazon, et al have decades of experience in shipping custom hardware at scale, and it is not a simple field to pivot into
True, but Google has their own models and did not sign this either.
The other thing that comes to mind is they want to avoid the government from banning open models as has been suggested by some of the closed models providers.
Nvidia benefits no matter what because their hardware is being used. Microsoft and Meta benefit by making sure that the gap between "Anthropic/OpenAI" and "everyone else" doesn't widen, or they'll be hopelessly dependent on those frontier labs.
Probably the fact that they don't want Anthropic or Google or OpenAI to have access to their data theoretically, and that they do want to use good AI, and that they don't want to spend the money themselves to make a good model...
Probably a real effort to push for some kind of sanctions or commerce block on Chinese models. Anthropic just doubled their political spending to $40 mil for the midterms to push for "AI Safety."
I suspect that whatever Musk has agreed to spend on the midterms in exchange for those sweetheart deals the SpaceX IPO got will make that look absolutely comical, but we’ll see.
To some degree even unintentionally this is all inevitable. I know this isn’t what you’re taking about, but it’s a similar line of thought. These models are consuming public free information, and they’re all also producing free public information, so they’re all pissing and drinking into same pool.
If we go down the line of dead internet theory which I’m becoming more convinced of these days, the volume of information that’s not necessarily original or extracted from reality and just interpolated and extrapolated from existing information in different ways by LLMs will greatly outnumber human information coming up.
In which case these models should.. start to converge on the same data I imagine, with slightly different behaviors within that. One big generative orgy feedback loop.
The list of companies that signed this letter is telling (including Nvidia, Meta, Microsoft). Equally telling is the list of companies that did not sign it -- including Google, Amazon.
> Could you elaborate? I don't understand your implication. Amazon in particular hosts open weight models via Amazon Bedrock (e.g. Ministral 14B 3.0, DeepSeek V3.2, ...)
It means Google and Amazon do not care and would not voice their opposition against the government action.
Makes sense for Microsoft. Copilot is already capable of being model agnostic (both GH Copilot, obviously, and M365 as well). They're an enterprise software & services company, they want to sell integrated AI tooling in their stack, powered by whatever models their customers want rather than any specific model.
Models are quickly becoming a dumb pipe, like an ISP. Just a commodity. The labs should rightfully be terrified, eventually the value isn't going to come from the model itself but the tools & integrations built on top. Non-tech businesses and non-tech employees don't want to buy API access to a model, they want to buy off the shelf software with its capabilities packaged up into a pretty, easy to use GUI.
I don't know about that, a lot of those bloated enterprise solutions are becoming obsolete fast, and integrations becoming a moot point as these models advance.
Maybe for startups or simple orgs, but in any regulated industry/high compliance requirements they are still useful or outright required.
Claude Team w/ Cowork still only lets you set R/W permissions globally for each MCP connector for the whole team, they still don't offer config on a per-user basis. The enterprise controls are sorely lacking first party. Maybe fine for most startups or flat orgs, but any established enterprise with strong identity & access governance is going to have an issue with that. You can make it work, but you need to make your own agent/harness and give it an identity in Entra or whatever else you use, so for a non-tech company without a dev team, right back to square one of preferring to just buy a COTS solution vs trying to hand out direct model access with minimal governance.
(M365) Copilot sucks but Microsoft is putting a ton of work into agent governance & identity that sorely lacking elsewhere.
MSFT, dell, NVIDIA. These guys will make money no matter who uses what AI since they're the hardware providers. Even though they all own stake in frontier labs, chinese open weight models will commoditize the intelligence layer.
The Chinese open models are way ahead, not by how capable they are compared to frontier models, but on how they project to the world and how they improve over time.
I don't feel it's meaningful to berate the point anymore about the hypocrisy of the American labs. Now as the sentiment and effort from them to push for regulation increases so does my perception of how pathetic they are behaving. I'm not sure how else to say it other than that it's honestly just embarrassing to watch China and others run circles around us in the USA.
Ultimately the market will balance demand and supply. From a strategic perspective big players want to get to a level playing field as soon as possible as then their market reach and capital wins the game. Pesky nimble small closed upstarts are in the best case a costly distraction and in the worst case a threat - Antropic and Openai did not sign the letter.
Predictable power play by corporate strategy and legal departments.
It makes a ton of sense to see this sort of joint effort being made by these enormous companies, but man, there's some part of me that can't help but feel grossed out knowing the best way to get the US to make the right choice is to have a handful of elite business people say it'd be bad for them.
Yeah, this letter is just proof of (the by now long standing fact) of corporate power/corporate capture of American governance. Tons of popular protests against big AI? Makes no difference. Joint corporate letter about big AI? Possibly the government will do something.
If you support the ideas described in Nvidia's letter, you're going against popular opinion. Most Americans do not want to "make advanced AI more accessible, adaptable, and widely available". Indeed, many areas of the country including the entire state of New York have enacted datacenter moratoriums, responding to the widespread public concern that we can't have too much AI or it'll drink all our water.
What does copyright have to do with anything? You also cannot copyright an encryption algorithm, but the US Government banned essentially mathematics for YEARS[0].
Openai and Anthropic's doom porn are also not helping their cause. The public will turn against them and watch their margin get eaten alive by open weight models
Maybe less shocking, but still, so is google. I know they are one of the labs, but that being said they rely far less on gemini for revenue as opposed to the big 2.
I think Google can play both sides here: they may end up a frontier lab if OpenAI/Anthropic dissolve, or a regular LLM provider, in which case they could be serving open models.
I'm finding the list of signatories on this letter really interesting and somewhat confusing, looking purely through the lens of economic interest.
It makes sense to see Meta, the startups, and the VC firms on this list. And it makes sense to see OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google all missing. Microsoft is somewhat unexpected to me. I don't think of them as having a focus on open weight models (no more than Google), and they have a large stake in OpenAI. Maybe they're looking at this from the angle of Azure providing compute. But then why is Amazon missing, when it has AWS?
And of course, we don't see DeepSeek, Moonshot, or Z.ai on here. The letter is about American technological leadership after all. But then we _do_ see the French company Mistral! Mistral who released [a playbook](https://europe.mistral.ai/) for Europe becoming a self-reliant AI powerhouse.
I assume all of this is in the context of influencing the Trump administration's thinking on Chinese open weights models. But the letter is really about _American_ open weights models. The call to action is all about keeping the American open weights ecosystem competitive. I didn't even realize that was under threat, so I feel like I'm missing something.
Both the CEO of Palantir and the CEO of Microsoft have recently criticized very strongly the business model of OpenAI and Anthropic.
Therefore it is no surprise that both companies are among the signatories.
The motivation of Palantir is very transparent, they have launched a product created in cooperation with NVIDIA, which is a turnkey system (Sovereign AI) that includes all hardware (i.e. a rack with servers full of NVIDIA GPUs) and all software needed by a company to run on its premises LLM inference and also training/fine tuning.
Thus the Palantir product competes with OpenAI and Anthropic and it benefits from the existence of open weights LLMs.
The motivation of Microsoft is more obscure for now, but because its criticism was very similar to that of Palantir, about how dangerous it is for corporations to delegate the processing of their AI needs to external entities like OpenAI and Anthropic, I assume that Microsoft is also going to propose an alternative to using remotely the OpenAI and Anthropic APIs.
Unlike Palantir, Microsoft is not likely to suggest self-hosting on premises, but I suppose that they might promote self-hosting on some kind of instances rented from Azure.
> but I suppose that they might promote self-hosting on some kind of instances rented from Azure.
Yeah, Microsoft wants to sell Azure compute. They also want to sell their upcoming surface ultra hardware with the Nvidia chip in it. They preached hard on "unmetered intelligence" at this year's BUILD conference, went hard on local AI, and Azure Foundry, Windows Foundry Local, etc.
Copilot, both GH and M365, are also made to be model agnostic. Microsoft sells enterprise services and software, they'd prefer (I'm assuming) to not be locked in and dependent on any 1 or 2 model providers and would prefer plenty of options and competition in that space because they can just easily offer a model agnostic harness, integrated with the rest of their stack.
Commoditization of the model layer is to Azure's benefit. It would help to avoid the model layer becoming a platform that commoditizes cloud into a pure bare metal business. It also redistributes 'consumer' surplus back to the end user via a lower effective price, which would conceivably increase demand for IaaS and/or PaaS which are complements.
My hunch is they are all seeing the problems at OpenAI and some other collateral damage on the horizon. They don’t want the US government intervening to try to save OpenAI. A little controlled burn is probably good for the industry long term.
> But the letter is really about _American_ open weights models.
AI models don’t really have nationality. They don’t have race/ethnicity fields on their model cards. It’s impossible to determine the country of origin of a model by looking at their weights. There is no DNA test for AIs. They exist in a mathematical space where human-made borders make no sense.
This means IF there is a regulation for open weight models, it has to apply to ALL open weight models. There is no any other option, since you can always train/fine-tune a model to change it’s weights and rebrand it as a new model.
People certainly don't act that way. A lot of the talk is about how great free Chinese models are. Like, they're grouped by the fact that they're Chinese.
How much of that is organic versus something a agitprop agent is commenting in places like HN would be interesting to know, but people very much talk about that from a nationality perspective.
(a) sellers of hardware (Nvidia, IBM) and those who rent hardware out to others (Amazon, Microsoft)
They want open models because they don't have to license it to run it on their hardware, so they can offer lower cost and inspect what they are offering to clients
(b) open model creators (Arcee, Perplexity, Mistral, IBM, Microsoft)
...who would be unable to work if open-weight models are banned
(c) Software-heavy companies ( Mozilla, The Linux Foundation , ServiceNow, Microsoft, IBM, heck all of them)
...who want models that are cheap to run because that reduces the cost of running an LLM (whether you are trying to replace a software developer or just assist them, the value of a reduced cost LLM is directionally the same)
MS is playing literally all the sides in this whole AI thing. They are a massive investor in oAI, and have lots of rights to use their models for a long time. They also have the cloud where they offer inference w/ all the benefits of already being there, data retention, etc. They also have a research wing that can build models (rumours are they're aiming for frontier-ish). I don't think there's currently an angle in this AI thing that MS hasn't aimed for.
> The call to action is all about keeping the American open weights ecosystem competitive. I didn't even realize that was under threat, so I feel like I'm missing something.
OpenAI and Anthropic can bring American open-weight model providers like Meta to court but not the Chinese. Chinese companies breaking American IP law (whether the law is correct or not) are basically immune. This has been going on forever, I guess enough is at stake finally for the federal government to care.
It helps to understand there are multiple factions within the white house and trump admin. One faction is very hawkish towards allies and enemies, especially China. Another is the one sending ICE to invade American cities, the Christian nationalism and such. Another is very focused on wealth expansion for friends and family. There is an amount of Venn to these groups.
At the end of the day, these companies that signed this letter have more cash. What they should do is bring some money together, more money than the other side, donate it and buy their way. That's the 2026 way, no one has time for all this letter and protest. How much are they willing to put on the line?
And the verdict is still out on if it's going to be cheaper than employees in the long run. Maybe for companies in HCoL areas (SV/NYC), but any smaller mid-market org in a LCoL area, frontier model token spend may not end up all that cheaper when your employee salaries are $55k-$75k/year so you're mostly evaluating it as an additional force multiplier expense rather than a headcount replacer.
For hosted models, there's no way to know what the real costs are. But we know what it costs to run the open models, and moore's law tells us that it's going to get cheaper, at least for the same capabilities they have today.
The fully loaded cost of employees at that salary level is likely over $100K. You may still be right on the relative expenses, but you can't just look at the top-level salary line.
There are a lot of unknowns. It will probably be harder to get an acceptable quality outcome in most fields than in the text-based, limited vocabulary, comparatively highly structured, granularly documented, relatively unambiguous world of code. For the ones where it’s even possible with our current approach, the economics might not even be feasible to provide the service. Based on how much money these companies need to start making to keep the infrastructure running, let alone expanding, we just don’t know what the landscape will even look like in a couple years.
Nope, not low at all. In the Midwest that’s exceedingly normal, even for non-entry level. $70k a year is living good in the Midwest, especially if dual income household ($140k a year is plenty when a decent house goes for $300k).
I think they're generalizing beyond software engineers with what they're saying. G&A, Marketing, etc roles pay significantly less than software engineers and that $55-75k figure is realistic in lower cost of living areas. Even in Colorado, which the Denver Metro Area is HCOL, there are companies (smaller, regional, not national/global) still offering that level of salary.
Yeah, correct, I wasn't thinking of devs specifically, more other office/administrative roles threatened by automation. Even where I live in a relatively HCOL area, any non-dev office role you can still expect to see a$65-$80k salary range, and $80k is pushing toward the top end for non tech roles.
That is a completely normal programmer salary in many countries, Silicon valley wages are just nuts. For example in Finland 55k before taxes is pretty good for ordinary non-wizard guy who can code, if you are a junior 40k is more realistic (and finding job in the first place can be a huge chaĺlenge..).
It's also a completely normal salary for non-dev, non-IT roles in most of the US that aren't major HCoL cities, which are the roles I was referring too mostly where the cost tradeoff of AI vs. Hiring humans isn't as clear cut as the labs marketing departments want everyone to believe.
Even in the US, only about 23% of workers earn $100k/year or more.
According to the US BLS, the median income for "knowledge workers" is ~$65k-$72k/year.
People in SF, NYC, etc. live completely different lives from the rest of the country.
We are talking about the U.S. here, and no, 40k or 55k are not good salaries at all. It may be OK in Europe with the lower cost of living, etc., but the price of a new car is 50k in 2026, and a basic fast food meal pretty much anywhere is well north of $10.
The issue is not open weights as a whole, indeed Hegseth himself said they are important for America (if American made, presumably); the issue is Chinese models, whether open or not, and that's what's looking to be banned, and nothing in this article suggests otherwise.
The conversation going on in the industry is a bit broader than that. OpenAI's head of strategic futures just said last week that open models are inherently decelerationist, ungovernable, and will slow development on the frontier. You'll notice OpenAI does not appear as a signatory here despite their relationship with Microsoft.
>open models are inherently decelerationist, ungovernable, and will slow development on the frontier
Ungovernable makes intuitive sense, but I don’t understand how open weight models could be decelerationist or slow the development of the frontier. Was there an argument for those positions?
Open weight models challenge the "winner takes all" hypothesis, which motivates the astronomical valuations and acts as a justification for trains of cash dumped into AI development.
In other words, if AI models become a commodity, the "AI leaders" will not be able to burn the cash like they do today, thus resulting in a "slower" (one could say instead "more sustainable") development of AI models.
It's a copy/paste of the arguments against open source software from decades ago. The argument goes: innovation requires profit motive, and profit motive requires IP rights. Of course, this was soundly disproven in software and I don't see any reason it should be different here.
Well of course OpenAI and Anthropic say those sorts of things, it's what they've always said, particularly Anthropic, but that doesn't necessarily mean that's the position of the US government. In other words the government seems to be listening to some but not all of the lobbying done by the big two.
The guy who said those things just joined OpenAI in the last month. He was previously a senior policy advisor, specifically on AI, to the current administration in the White House.
I don't know that the US government has a unified position on open source AI. But it's not like this isn't a discussion happening among policymakers.
> ...the issue is Chinese models, whether open or not, and that's what's looking to be banned...
Is the US planning to invade China and take away their models? Because otherwise China is still going to have the models even if the US bans them. I don't think they're going to be going with the US position on this one.
It's the same patronizing nonsense as when all the US webcos pulled out of the Chinese market in some misguided supposed protest believing the Chinese so incapable of rolling their own Google, Amazon or WhatsApp they will come begging the americans to go back. Now the western tech universe goes to China for ideas.
If by "pulled out of the Chinese market" you mean "were hacked by the Chinese government in a way that compromised their intellectual property and the safety of dissidents", then yes [0]
The point is did the US reaction work or was it completely counter productive?
Then will attempting to cutoff China again today work or do we expect that also will prove to achieve the exact opposite of what its proponents are claiming?
We didn't cut off anything. American companies would have been more than happy to continue offering products and services in the Chinese market.
The Chinese government didn't like that idea. They attacked American companies, stole the IP, and created their own analogs of American corporate offerings. If you are a company and are targeted by a totalitarian government, it's not unreasonable to pull out of that totalitarian government's jurisdiction.
Honestly, the American response to that was not nearly stout enough. Chinese goods and services had been sold in the US without issue for decades at that point, often to the detriment of both domestic and other international market players. When China was expected to play by those rules and allow American companies to do business in a mostly-unfettered way, they attacked the companies and drove them out of their market.
Banned in the US, obviously, not worldwide. The problem is if the US wanted to, they actually could enforce such a ban nearly worldwide, by putting Chinese AI companies on a sanctions list and disallowing any US company (or anyone that does business with a US company, which is much of the world) from touching them.
Why anyone would care what Hegseth thinks about open weight models? What's wrong with Chinese models? The censorship? I think it's good to have diversity of opinion. Get US flavored output on sensitive subjects from US models and ZH on ZH models. That's a useful tool.
Companies that are hurt by open weight models fight against them.
Companies that benefit from open weight models fight overregulation.
Color me surprised.
I don't personally have a horse in this race, but if you want to accurately predict the next step:
Start with the outcome you believe will be the most in line with the spirit and traditions of the open source community. This is precisely what won't happen.
It won't necessarily be the inverse. It could be, of course, but it's also likely to be a compromise between the two.
For a topical example: The companies doing "AI" layoffs aren't doing so out of a sense of having failed their staff that helped carry them so far. Often, these announcements come on the heels of record-breaking profits. They're doing it out of contempt for workers.
See https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/cory-doctoro... for Doctorow's take on centaurs vs. reverse centaurs. Broadly speaking: C-suite business leadership wants reverse centaurs. Workers want centaurs. Unless you have a union (or some other collective bargaining power structure that I'm not aware of), the C-suite calls the shots.
The same can be said of the current administration. They don't give a fuck what most of us want on any given issue. They're captured by an aggressive ideology. Their only incentive is to be able to spin their decision to make themselves look good; to posture as "strong" leadership.
Ideology? I think this administration is the least captured by ideology in the last few decades. It's mostly brazen self-interest, for both entertainment & profit.
> Start with the outcome you believe will be the most in line with the spirit and traditions of the open source community
there's nothing open source about an open weight model. It's more like the binary blobs Linux fought so hard against. If you can't compile, or in this case train, from source then you're missing the "source" part of open source.
> Open source did more than lower the cost of software; it created a shared foundation of knowledge on which generations of American engineers and entrepreneurs built their institutional sovereignty
Hey nvidia, what about making your full set of linux drivers open source?
I mean, I do agree that being open is important but you're hijacking the narrative here, and I suspect being open have nothing to do with any of this.
i'm glad someone else sees this too. There's nothing open source about an open-weight model. I feel like they're just trying to associate themselves with open source and the positive impacts it has had on software technolgoy.
Great, how about some frontier models like China seems to be doing on a weekly basis at this point. Give us a CoPilot variant that's open source & open weights.
It's not worthless, you don't have to agree with P on everything, or make it personal - it works as strictly business - only where and when appropriate.
I agree with the message, but I'm not going to accept it from this particular crowd.
Microsoft, NVIDIA, Meta, Palantir, IBM...They have all been actively hostile to open source for decades, and have a history of embracing it only when convenient and profitable.
Microsoft benefited from its close partnership with OpenAI for years right up until it went sour. Where was this enthusiasm for open weights then?
Meta was developing open models and then abandoned that effort in search for profits. Muse Spark is now fully closed.
All these companies have the resouces to train and release frontier open weights models today, but choose not to. So spare me the marketing and virtue signaling.
I’ll never forgive Microsoft for their hostile actions against open source and open standards in the 90s. I’ll never believe any endorsement from them of open-anything.
Yeah, the endorsement logos at the bottom are majority bad actors with regards to openness in code. Many are bad actors with regards to openness in _society_.
https://www.anthropic.com/news/donation-public-first-action
Probably because anthropic is pouring $40 million dollars into a political pact to regulate models. And they have not been quiet about wanting to ban/regulate OSS models either.
I have no idea why HN still treats them like ~their~ they are the ethical good guy.
Edit: I can’t English. At least we know this came from my dumb swishy brain
> I have no idea why HN still treats them like their the ethical good guy.
I don't know that HN usually does. But they did buy a decent amount of publicity by (initially) telling the US government no in using the models for war.
They never did that. They said all they required was a human in the loop for kill decisions. No autonomous kill drones.
Human in the loop is infeasible in comms denied areas which is what we have in Ukraine/Russia right now.
It's why Ukraine and Russia are now using fully autonomous drones. That's the only real solution to jamming.
What does that have to do with LLMs hosted by Anthropic. They didn't say the Dept of War couldn't make kill bots. They said no using Claude to make kill decisions. A quadcopter drone running on a Raspberry Pi isn't running an Anthropic model locally.
They did something Sam wouldn't do at the very least.
Some irony: I subscribe to Claude and Codex (20x plans), and now Kimi.
Why Kimi? because K3 is the only frontier model I can have a serious conversation with about my product's security.
(I did apply for OpenAi's Cyber Pilot but got no response)
> (I did apply for OpenAi's Cyber Pilot but got no response)
Same experience with Anthropic's. I applied for my employer, and.. 0 response.
The product strategy of 'consumer-grade' AI making deliberately insecure software, and then selling you limited access to the model that can fix it (if they think you deserve to pay them) is just diabolical.
(Grade 3 AI which can hack both previous tiers is exclusively sold to the highest bidder.)
I don't think it's nefarious, but the end result leads to a pretty frustrating experience by anybody needing actual security work. (and without the organizational deep pockets to obtain SOC 2 attestation)
> AI making deliberately insecure software, and then selling you limited access to the model that can fix it (if they think you deserve to pay them) is just diabolical.
It's also not a very good marketing strategy, secure software and quality also goes in pair and it just makes me doubt about the output of Fable/Sol
> K3 is the only frontier model I can have a serious conversation with about my product's security.
This is wrong IMO. You should have a serious conversation about your products security with someone who is actually trained on that subject. LLMs are useless if you don't already know more about the thing than the LLM, or if you don't care too much about the outcome (internal tools etc.)
This has been the prevailing advice all along, and yet we have security vulnerabilities everywhere that LLMs are good at spotting and exploiting. I think we need more options on the menu.
I think security is an integral part of any production software, and if you get value from LLM's in software development, it seems likely they can be useful in security too.
My point and frustration is that gatekeeping in the name of Security makes the Chinese models actually better at security than USA models.
I think I like this perspective because it points to where regulation might be more usefully applied than “the oracle must be prevented from answering certain question” and more like, “if you handle PII or provide services as a defense contractor, you may not take security advice from an oracle”
I posted earlier on reddit that at this point, the closed source lobby wanting to ban open weights is effectively outgunned (musk also publicly supported this).
The oddly reminds me of back in the day when SOPA had caused a similar stir (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act), and all HN was up in arms against it.
From yesterday:
Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49023016 - July 2026 (841 comments)
Also related:
OpenAI and Anthropic unite against open-weight AI risks to their bottom line - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49020868 - July 2026 (330 comments)
China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48979269 - July 2026 (932 comments)
The gap between open weights LLMs and closed source LLMs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48692058 - June 2026 (250 comments)
The unbearable cheapness of open weight models - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48668255 - June 2026 (186 comments)
I wonder what is happening behind closed doors for these companies to be issuing such a joint letter.
The future will probably have most of all companies running local models, simply because the alternative would be essentially every company that uses LLMs ending up becoming completely dependent upon Anthropic et al. And that dependence would be milked to the point of absurdity once solidly established.
And as a more general point - more major competitors in a domain is very good for everybody except those competitors themselves, who would rather there be as few as possible.
Yeah I fully expect companies with lots of GPUs but not a good model like Microsoft and Amazon to just take these open weight models and make money, the GPU expense is the only moat at this point.
It’s classic commoditize your complement, nobody can replicate the cloud providers, everyone can replicate the models with open weights.
Is that different from how companies are reliant on cloud computing?
Yes. No law prevents you from provisioning and using your own hardware.
There absolutely are laws restricting what hardware you are allowed to use. e.g. https://www.fcc.gov/faqs-recent-updates-fcc-covered-list-reg...
This argument would make more sense if the cloud providers used these devices but you were not allowed to.
Those are routers - not general purpose computers.
NVIDIA sells the tools. The more the better it is for them.
Microsoft and Meta are also-rans at this point. Their best hope of catching up is probably leveraging their infra and open models.
Agreed for NVIDA's strategy. Saw from a previous thread but Joel's commoditize your complement essay makes a lot of sense for NVIDIA. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
"leveraging their infra" is a pretty solid play, considering the scope of investments these two companies have made thus far.
Isn’t Microsoft perpetually short on capacity?
https://windowsforum.com/threads/azure-capacity-crunch-exten...
It does however totally abandon the question of making a profitable mass-market AI product upon which the scale of those investments was based.
Not entirely, if models become commodity, then Microsoft's play as an infrastructure & enterprise apps company is the better bet. They don't need to make profitable mass-market AI models, they just need the best tooling on top of any model their customers pick, remaining fully model agnostic.
"AI Product" doesn't necessarily mean "We sell API access to a our models." Ton of companies out there itching to buy a commercial off the shelf product to deliver whatever AI capabilities they need packaged in a nice GUI, with enterprise governance controls, without needing a dev team/team of engineers to integrate it or develop harnesses, etc.
Buy it->have IT click a few buttons in an admin console->Deploy and have it be immediately useful is the play.
AI services becoming a commodity by definition means that the price will hover around cost to operate. That's just what commoditization means in tech. Free, as in Google creating a free browser for no profit in order to increase the size of their ad market.
The entire justification for the AI buildout, and the valuations of all the major AI labs, is that the service will be priced at some significant fraction of the knowledge work it's replacing. If you think it will become commoditized in the future, you are saying these companies are significantly overvalued at present.
> you are saying these companies are significantly overvalued at present.
I do lean toward them being significantly overvalued at present. OpenAI & Anthropic's valuations assume high margin product pricing on raw intelligence itself. Even if assume the labs will start charging value-based pricing, enterprise buyers will pay that pricing to whoever saves them engineering hours to make any cheap model work inside their compliance boundary, no guarantee that's going to be OpenAI or Anthropic.
Microsoft wins either way, proprietary, expensive models or cheap commoditized inference, because they monetize the workflow on top, not the raw intelligence. I also happen to think it's everything "on top" where a lot of value lives. Plenty of non-tech enterprises and companies out there itching for a ClickOps style AI product, especially if they don't have an engineering team, that they can buy off the shelf, meets all the compliance checkboxes, and does what they need without having to build the agents and harnesses themselves with the APIs.
Nvidia is subject to export restrictions on GPUs to China. So Chinese labs have responded by allowing American hosts to run their open-weight models in the US, where there are no restrictions. We see this in the EU too where Scaleway, and now Hetzner are getting into the inference host space serving Chinese open-weight models.
So Nvidia benefits from more inference providers running many Chinese models that they otherwise would not have been able to service.
Oh, that’s interesting. I think the general expectation was that blocking exports to China would result in companies there building their own cards competing with NVIDIA. If it has incentivized them to release open weight models instead, that seems like an unexpected win.
It's all things at once. Perhaps it's incentivized the open weight strategy. It's also prompted Huawei to ramp up production of AI chips to try and create a local competitor to Nvidia. It's also also created a grey market for Nvidia chips within China.
They've seen the government officials parroting OpenAI and Anthropic lobbies talking points, and they have smart enough people to see the signs of upcoming regulatory capture.
If I were cynical, I'd say it isn't helped by the current US administration.
Different companies have different motivations. I'm sure some are genuine, but a lot of them simply lost the race (to OpenAI/Anthropic/Google) and know they can't compete anymore, so are shifting strategies. How many times has Microsoft done exactly this in the past?
looking at both openai and anthropic; they are winning something, but a sober look at their finances will make you silently mouth "but what did they win".
They want to be the successor to Enron.
If there are effectively only two AI companies allowed to train or run model inference then demand for hosting, GPUs and data centers goes down, so they'd be able to squeeze their suppliers that much more too.
Almost certainly these companies are using similar strategies as the Chinese models which they fear will be made illegal.
It's also the case that it makes it hard to attract customers if your openweight model is banned. A major reason the likes of Qwen, Kimi, GLM, and Deepseek are popular (well, at least highly talked about) is because of the open weight models they gave away.
They are worried about OpenAI and Anthropic making their own processors and controlling the whole stack is my guess.
They really don't need to be very worried about that. Google, Microsoft, Amazon, et al have decades of experience in shipping custom hardware at scale, and it is not a simple field to pivot into
True, but Google has their own models and did not sign this either.
The other thing that comes to mind is they want to avoid the government from banning open models as has been suggested by some of the closed models providers.
Nvidia benefits no matter what because their hardware is being used. Microsoft and Meta benefit by making sure that the gap between "Anthropic/OpenAI" and "everyone else" doesn't widen, or they'll be hopelessly dependent on those frontier labs.
I'm not certain about this statement because Huawei created their own chip.
Probably the fact that they don't want Anthropic or Google or OpenAI to have access to their data theoretically, and that they do want to use good AI, and that they don't want to spend the money themselves to make a good model...
Probably a real effort to push for some kind of sanctions or commerce block on Chinese models. Anthropic just doubled their political spending to $40 mil for the midterms to push for "AI Safety."
I suspect that whatever Musk has agreed to spend on the midterms in exchange for those sweetheart deals the SpaceX IPO got will make that look absolutely comical, but we’ll see.
I don't see why convincing people to overpay for something based on hype and artificial scarcity required any "sweetheart deals" via congress.
It would be interesting to know how many optimizations of the Chinese models were incorporated back into Claude and Codex.
I may be remembering wrong, but reasoning was first demonstrated by DeepSeek. Edit: I am indeed remembering wrong, seems o1 was first.
Deepseek’s R1 paper was the first paper to describe how to do it. O1 was released before R1 came out.
A month before the R1 paper came out, they released the Deepseek math paper which described their method for MoE load balancing.
Many of the Chinese optimizations are public because they are published by the Chinese labs themselves. Hard to say what the labs are doing of course.
DeepSeek has published some really good papers. Lately they're pushing really hard for dramatically cheaper serving costs.
To some degree even unintentionally this is all inevitable. I know this isn’t what you’re taking about, but it’s a similar line of thought. These models are consuming public free information, and they’re all also producing free public information, so they’re all pissing and drinking into same pool.
If we go down the line of dead internet theory which I’m becoming more convinced of these days, the volume of information that’s not necessarily original or extracted from reality and just interpolated and extrapolated from existing information in different ways by LLMs will greatly outnumber human information coming up.
In which case these models should.. start to converge on the same data I imagine, with slightly different behaviors within that. One big generative orgy feedback loop.
Let me put it this way: if they're not ripping off all that they can, their investors need to shitcan the leadership.
The list of companies that signed this letter is telling (including Nvidia, Meta, Microsoft). Equally telling is the list of companies that did not sign it -- including Google, Amazon.
Google and Amazon are Anthropic investors right?
> Equally telling is the list of companies that did not sign it -- including Google, Amazon.
Could you elaborate? I don't understand your implication.
Amazon in particular hosts open weight models via Amazon Bedrock (e.g. Ministral 14B 3.0, DeepSeek V3.2, ...)[1].
In case it changes the context of this comment, I am a Meta employee, all opinions are my own.
[1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/bedrock/latest/userguide/model-c...
> Could you elaborate? I don't understand your implication. Amazon in particular hosts open weight models via Amazon Bedrock (e.g. Ministral 14B 3.0, DeepSeek V3.2, ...)
It means Google and Amazon do not care and would not voice their opposition against the government action.
Just saw on Microsoft
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/corporate-responsibility/top...
Makes sense Microsoft is placing it self as a model host and os providing open weight models for much cheaper on their infra already.
No wonder openai and anthropic are terrified
Makes sense for Microsoft. Copilot is already capable of being model agnostic (both GH Copilot, obviously, and M365 as well). They're an enterprise software & services company, they want to sell integrated AI tooling in their stack, powered by whatever models their customers want rather than any specific model.
Models are quickly becoming a dumb pipe, like an ISP. Just a commodity. The labs should rightfully be terrified, eventually the value isn't going to come from the model itself but the tools & integrations built on top. Non-tech businesses and non-tech employees don't want to buy API access to a model, they want to buy off the shelf software with its capabilities packaged up into a pretty, easy to use GUI.
I don't know about that, a lot of those bloated enterprise solutions are becoming obsolete fast, and integrations becoming a moot point as these models advance.
Maybe for startups or simple orgs, but in any regulated industry/high compliance requirements they are still useful or outright required.
Claude Team w/ Cowork still only lets you set R/W permissions globally for each MCP connector for the whole team, they still don't offer config on a per-user basis. The enterprise controls are sorely lacking first party. Maybe fine for most startups or flat orgs, but any established enterprise with strong identity & access governance is going to have an issue with that. You can make it work, but you need to make your own agent/harness and give it an identity in Entra or whatever else you use, so for a non-tech company without a dev team, right back to square one of preferring to just buy a COTS solution vs trying to hand out direct model access with minimal governance.
(M365) Copilot sucks but Microsoft is putting a ton of work into agent governance & identity that sorely lacking elsewhere.
If you see the long 3rd paragraph twice, know that you are not alone.
MSFT, dell, NVIDIA. These guys will make money no matter who uses what AI since they're the hardware providers. Even though they all own stake in frontier labs, chinese open weight models will commoditize the intelligence layer.
Reassuring to see this backed by major players.
This is the correct stance, hopefully this is the stance that prevails.
Hopefully something good comes from this... But I certainly don't see the big players caving in: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47929951>
The Chinese open models are way ahead, not by how capable they are compared to frontier models, but on how they project to the world and how they improve over time.
I don't feel it's meaningful to berate the point anymore about the hypocrisy of the American labs. Now as the sentiment and effort from them to push for regulation increases so does my perception of how pathetic they are behaving. I'm not sure how else to say it other than that it's honestly just embarrassing to watch China and others run circles around us in the USA.
> I'm not sure how else to say it other than that it's honestly just embarrassing to watch China and others run circles around us in the USA.
The gap is shrinking, but considering their models still lag our frontier, I wouldn't say they "run circles" around us.
Would be nice to see standardized open weight classes: 12B, 24B, 48B… Who can make the best open model in each weight class.
…and with the size of each class determined by common target memory sizes i.e. 32GB or 64GB or 128 GB minus cache and a little overhead
Ultimately the market will balance demand and supply. From a strategic perspective big players want to get to a level playing field as soon as possible as then their market reach and capital wins the game. Pesky nimble small closed upstarts are in the best case a costly distraction and in the worst case a threat - Antropic and Openai did not sign the letter.
Predictable power play by corporate strategy and legal departments.
It makes a ton of sense to see this sort of joint effort being made by these enormous companies, but man, there's some part of me that can't help but feel grossed out knowing the best way to get the US to make the right choice is to have a handful of elite business people say it'd be bad for them.
Yeah, this letter is just proof of (the by now long standing fact) of corporate power/corporate capture of American governance. Tons of popular protests against big AI? Makes no difference. Joint corporate letter about big AI? Possibly the government will do something.
People unfortunately keep voting for “corporate power” politicians, so corporations continue to be in charge.
If you support the ideas described in Nvidia's letter, you're going against popular opinion. Most Americans do not want to "make advanced AI more accessible, adaptable, and widely available". Indeed, many areas of the country including the entire state of New York have enacted datacenter moratoriums, responding to the widespread public concern that we can't have too much AI or it'll drink all our water.
Wait.. If "distillation" produces better results than the "original" models, why don't the US model owners do it to themselves?
Have ChatGPT 5.6 talk to itself to produce 5.7 or whatever?
And since they already know which requests came from China or looked like distillation, can't they just replay those same prompts?
This is all a moot point because there's no way you can copyright a model because you can just randomly perturb weights and still be fine.
What does copyright have to do with anything? You also cannot copyright an encryption algorithm, but the US Government banned essentially mathematics for YEARS[0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...
Yeah copyright is kinda just like "if we say it's so then it's so"
You can randomly shift every pixel in a movie by +/-1, doesn't make the original not copyrightable.
I mean movies are up on YouTube slightly pitch shifted lol.
Openai and Anthropic's doom porn are also not helping their cause. The public will turn against them and watch their margin get eaten alive by open weight models
I wonder why Apple stayed absent from signing this?
I wonder if it has anything to do with Apple’s legal case against OAI.
This would support the hypothesis that they are incentivized as compute providers and not simply because they're losing the frontier llm race
Maybe less shocking, but still, so is google. I know they are one of the labs, but that being said they rely far less on gemini for revenue as opposed to the big 2.
I think Google can play both sides here: they may end up a frontier lab if OpenAI/Anthropic dissolve, or a regular LLM provider, in which case they could be serving open models.
I think if anyone at Apple signs a plea that has the word 'open' in it they spontaneously combust into flames
If it doesn't involve a walled garden subject to Apple's domination and control, it's not an Apple product.
Apple is allergic to industry-spanning consortiums.
I thought it would've made a lot of sense for Apple to be on this list as well.
Apple would be rather unaffected since they already signed a deal with Google/Gemini.
Because their long-term goal is to make AI a walled garden subscription.
I'm finding the list of signatories on this letter really interesting and somewhat confusing, looking purely through the lens of economic interest.
It makes sense to see Meta, the startups, and the VC firms on this list. And it makes sense to see OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google all missing. Microsoft is somewhat unexpected to me. I don't think of them as having a focus on open weight models (no more than Google), and they have a large stake in OpenAI. Maybe they're looking at this from the angle of Azure providing compute. But then why is Amazon missing, when it has AWS?
And of course, we don't see DeepSeek, Moonshot, or Z.ai on here. The letter is about American technological leadership after all. But then we _do_ see the French company Mistral! Mistral who released [a playbook](https://europe.mistral.ai/) for Europe becoming a self-reliant AI powerhouse.
I assume all of this is in the context of influencing the Trump administration's thinking on Chinese open weights models. But the letter is really about _American_ open weights models. The call to action is all about keeping the American open weights ecosystem competitive. I didn't even realize that was under threat, so I feel like I'm missing something.
Both the CEO of Palantir and the CEO of Microsoft have recently criticized very strongly the business model of OpenAI and Anthropic.
Therefore it is no surprise that both companies are among the signatories.
The motivation of Palantir is very transparent, they have launched a product created in cooperation with NVIDIA, which is a turnkey system (Sovereign AI) that includes all hardware (i.e. a rack with servers full of NVIDIA GPUs) and all software needed by a company to run on its premises LLM inference and also training/fine tuning.
Thus the Palantir product competes with OpenAI and Anthropic and it benefits from the existence of open weights LLMs.
The motivation of Microsoft is more obscure for now, but because its criticism was very similar to that of Palantir, about how dangerous it is for corporations to delegate the processing of their AI needs to external entities like OpenAI and Anthropic, I assume that Microsoft is also going to propose an alternative to using remotely the OpenAI and Anthropic APIs.
Unlike Palantir, Microsoft is not likely to suggest self-hosting on premises, but I suppose that they might promote self-hosting on some kind of instances rented from Azure.
> but I suppose that they might promote self-hosting on some kind of instances rented from Azure.
Yeah, Microsoft wants to sell Azure compute. They also want to sell their upcoming surface ultra hardware with the Nvidia chip in it. They preached hard on "unmetered intelligence" at this year's BUILD conference, went hard on local AI, and Azure Foundry, Windows Foundry Local, etc.
Copilot, both GH and M365, are also made to be model agnostic. Microsoft sells enterprise services and software, they'd prefer (I'm assuming) to not be locked in and dependent on any 1 or 2 model providers and would prefer plenty of options and competition in that space because they can just easily offer a model agnostic harness, integrated with the rest of their stack.
Commoditization of the model layer is to Azure's benefit. It would help to avoid the model layer becoming a platform that commoditizes cloud into a pure bare metal business. It also redistributes 'consumer' surplus back to the end user via a lower effective price, which would conceivably increase demand for IaaS and/or PaaS which are complements.
My hunch is they are all seeing the problems at OpenAI and some other collateral damage on the horizon. They don’t want the US government intervening to try to save OpenAI. A little controlled burn is probably good for the industry long term.
> But the letter is really about _American_ open weights models.
AI models don’t really have nationality. They don’t have race/ethnicity fields on their model cards. It’s impossible to determine the country of origin of a model by looking at their weights. There is no DNA test for AIs. They exist in a mathematical space where human-made borders make no sense.
This means IF there is a regulation for open weight models, it has to apply to ALL open weight models. There is no any other option, since you can always train/fine-tune a model to change it’s weights and rebrand it as a new model.
People certainly don't act that way. A lot of the talk is about how great free Chinese models are. Like, they're grouped by the fact that they're Chinese.
How much of that is organic versus something a agitprop agent is commenting in places like HN would be interesting to know, but people very much talk about that from a nationality perspective.
Signatories appear to group into
(a) sellers of hardware (Nvidia, IBM) and those who rent hardware out to others (Amazon, Microsoft)
They want open models because they don't have to license it to run it on their hardware, so they can offer lower cost and inspect what they are offering to clients
(b) open model creators (Arcee, Perplexity, Mistral, IBM, Microsoft)
...who would be unable to work if open-weight models are banned
(c) Software-heavy companies ( Mozilla, The Linux Foundation , ServiceNow, Microsoft, IBM, heck all of them)
...who want models that are cheap to run because that reduces the cost of running an LLM (whether you are trying to replace a software developer or just assist them, the value of a reduced cost LLM is directionally the same)
> Microsoft is somewhat unexpected to me
MS is playing literally all the sides in this whole AI thing. They are a massive investor in oAI, and have lots of rights to use their models for a long time. They also have the cloud where they offer inference w/ all the benefits of already being there, data retention, etc. They also have a research wing that can build models (rumours are they're aiming for frontier-ish). I don't think there's currently an angle in this AI thing that MS hasn't aimed for.
> The call to action is all about keeping the American open weights ecosystem competitive. I didn't even realize that was under threat, so I feel like I'm missing something.
OpenAI and Anthropic can bring American open-weight model providers like Meta to court but not the Chinese. Chinese companies breaking American IP law (whether the law is correct or not) are basically immune. This has been going on forever, I guess enough is at stake finally for the federal government to care.
Google and Amazon both have incredibly large compute deals with frontier labs and GovCloud. They may not want to sour on that cash.
It helps to understand there are multiple factions within the white house and trump admin. One faction is very hawkish towards allies and enemies, especially China. Another is the one sending ICE to invade American cities, the Christian nationalism and such. Another is very focused on wealth expansion for friends and family. There is an amount of Venn to these groups.
At the end of the day, these companies that signed this letter have more cash. What they should do is bring some money together, more money than the other side, donate it and buy their way. That's the 2026 way, no one has time for all this letter and protest. How much are they willing to put on the line?
How do you ban a model? Makes no sense ill just call in “not Chinese model” and sell it in America.
So the people lagging in the commercial model game are issuing this warning? Got it.
isn't the real world destroyer going to be when China starts cranking out it's own nvidia chip clones?
remember when bitcoin got its first dedicated hardware, will be like that
You can’t train on our models trained on human text, that is stealing the IP we stole first!
> The unbearable cheapness of open weight models
So the closed model try to get client with their model by saying it's cheaper than employees, and then turn around to lawyer-out cheaper alternative?
Truly the american dream.
The important thing is that Sam Altman and Dario Amodei become trillionaires. Everything must be decided in service of that one primary goal.
And the verdict is still out on if it's going to be cheaper than employees in the long run. Maybe for companies in HCoL areas (SV/NYC), but any smaller mid-market org in a LCoL area, frontier model token spend may not end up all that cheaper when your employee salaries are $55k-$75k/year so you're mostly evaluating it as an additional force multiplier expense rather than a headcount replacer.
For hosted models, there's no way to know what the real costs are. But we know what it costs to run the open models, and moore's law tells us that it's going to get cheaper, at least for the same capabilities they have today.
The fully loaded cost of employees at that salary level is likely over $100K. You may still be right on the relative expenses, but you can't just look at the top-level salary line.
There are a lot of unknowns. It will probably be harder to get an acceptable quality outcome in most fields than in the text-based, limited vocabulary, comparatively highly structured, granularly documented, relatively unambiguous world of code. For the ones where it’s even possible with our current approach, the economics might not even be feasible to provide the service. Based on how much money these companies need to start making to keep the infrastructure running, let alone expanding, we just don’t know what the landscape will even look like in a couple years.
??? These are not unknowns. It is pretty well documented how much more an employee costs over their outright comp
Those salaries seem low for mid sized cities even no?
Nope, not low at all. In the Midwest that’s exceedingly normal, even for non-entry level. $70k a year is living good in the Midwest, especially if dual income household ($140k a year is plenty when a decent house goes for $300k).
This is extremely regional dependent. Please don’t think 70K is living large across the majority of the Midwest, it is not.
It might not be living large, but it's a very comfortable income for a single person in pretty much the whole region.
Fair enough, 55k would’ve seemed pretty low to me in the NE for a fresh dev. Not 75k though.
55k is low for a dev, but not for a ton of other office/administrative roles that are threatened by AI automation.
I think they're generalizing beyond software engineers with what they're saying. G&A, Marketing, etc roles pay significantly less than software engineers and that $55-75k figure is realistic in lower cost of living areas. Even in Colorado, which the Denver Metro Area is HCOL, there are companies (smaller, regional, not national/global) still offering that level of salary.
Yeah, correct, I wasn't thinking of devs specifically, more other office/administrative roles threatened by automation. Even where I live in a relatively HCOL area, any non-dev office role you can still expect to see a$65-$80k salary range, and $80k is pushing toward the top end for non tech roles.
Yeah that would make more sense. Though it seems to me AI is currently better at reducing dev headcount than most other roles.
55k??
That is a completely normal programmer salary in many countries, Silicon valley wages are just nuts. For example in Finland 55k before taxes is pretty good for ordinary non-wizard guy who can code, if you are a junior 40k is more realistic (and finding job in the first place can be a huge chaĺlenge..).
It's also a completely normal salary for non-dev, non-IT roles in most of the US that aren't major HCoL cities, which are the roles I was referring too mostly where the cost tradeoff of AI vs. Hiring humans isn't as clear cut as the labs marketing departments want everyone to believe.
Even in the US, only about 23% of workers earn $100k/year or more.
According to the US BLS, the median income for "knowledge workers" is ~$65k-$72k/year.
People in SF, NYC, etc. live completely different lives from the rest of the country.
We are talking about the U.S. here, and no, 40k or 55k are not good salaries at all. It may be OK in Europe with the lower cost of living, etc., but the price of a new car is 50k in 2026, and a basic fast food meal pretty much anywhere is well north of $10.
And yet ~64+% of the US makes less than $74k/year. The median, once you filter out part-time and seasonal workers is ~$65k/year.
You're right, they are not good salaries but they are the reality of wages in the US outside of the SF/NYC bubble.
The issue is not open weights as a whole, indeed Hegseth himself said they are important for America (if American made, presumably); the issue is Chinese models, whether open or not, and that's what's looking to be banned, and nothing in this article suggests otherwise.
What is a "Chinese model"?
If I change one weight in Kimi, is it still a Chinese model?
If I fine-tune Kimi on pro-America nationalistic freedom loving anti-Chinese propaganda, is it still a Chinese model?
If I distill Kimi from one server to the next without ever directly transferring any weights, is it still a Chinese model?
If Claude accidentally trains on some of Kimi's output, is Claude then considered to be a Chinese model?
If China's next open-weight model is released secretly through a European company, is it still a Chinese model?
The conversation going on in the industry is a bit broader than that. OpenAI's head of strategic futures just said last week that open models are inherently decelerationist, ungovernable, and will slow development on the frontier. You'll notice OpenAI does not appear as a signatory here despite their relationship with Microsoft.
>open models are inherently decelerationist, ungovernable, and will slow development on the frontier
Ungovernable makes intuitive sense, but I don’t understand how open weight models could be decelerationist or slow the development of the frontier. Was there an argument for those positions?
Open weight models challenge the "winner takes all" hypothesis, which motivates the astronomical valuations and acts as a justification for trains of cash dumped into AI development.
In other words, if AI models become a commodity, the "AI leaders" will not be able to burn the cash like they do today, thus resulting in a "slower" (one could say instead "more sustainable") development of AI models.
Well maybe they should find better training methods or architectures
Tough shit welcome to capitalism
Here's his original post https://x.com/i/status/2078133895766114412
It's a copy/paste of the arguments against open source software from decades ago. The argument goes: innovation requires profit motive, and profit motive requires IP rights. Of course, this was soundly disproven in software and I don't see any reason it should be different here.
Chinese providers are actively debunking that argument by innovating on and releasing open weight models.
Well of course OpenAI and Anthropic say those sorts of things, it's what they've always said, particularly Anthropic, but that doesn't necessarily mean that's the position of the US government. In other words the government seems to be listening to some but not all of the lobbying done by the big two.
The guy who said those things just joined OpenAI in the last month. He was previously a senior policy advisor, specifically on AI, to the current administration in the White House.
I don't know that the US government has a unified position on open source AI. But it's not like this isn't a discussion happening among policymakers.
Surprised to see I partially agree. They are indeed ungovernable and that is the best part.
> ...the issue is Chinese models, whether open or not, and that's what's looking to be banned...
Is the US planning to invade China and take away their models? Because otherwise China is still going to have the models even if the US bans them. I don't think they're going to be going with the US position on this one.
It's the same patronizing nonsense as when all the US webcos pulled out of the Chinese market in some misguided supposed protest believing the Chinese so incapable of rolling their own Google, Amazon or WhatsApp they will come begging the americans to go back. Now the western tech universe goes to China for ideas.
If by "pulled out of the Chinese market" you mean "were hacked by the Chinese government in a way that compromised their intellectual property and the safety of dissidents", then yes [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Aurora
The point is did the US reaction work or was it completely counter productive?
Then will attempting to cutoff China again today work or do we expect that also will prove to achieve the exact opposite of what its proponents are claiming?
We didn't cut off anything. American companies would have been more than happy to continue offering products and services in the Chinese market.
The Chinese government didn't like that idea. They attacked American companies, stole the IP, and created their own analogs of American corporate offerings. If you are a company and are targeted by a totalitarian government, it's not unreasonable to pull out of that totalitarian government's jurisdiction.
Honestly, the American response to that was not nearly stout enough. Chinese goods and services had been sold in the US without issue for decades at that point, often to the detriment of both domestic and other international market players. When China was expected to play by those rules and allow American companies to do business in a mostly-unfettered way, they attacked the companies and drove them out of their market.
Banned in the US, obviously, not worldwide. The problem is if the US wanted to, they actually could enforce such a ban nearly worldwide, by putting Chinese AI companies on a sanctions list and disallowing any US company (or anyone that does business with a US company, which is much of the world) from touching them.
Why anyone would care what Hegseth thinks about open weight models? What's wrong with Chinese models? The censorship? I think it's good to have diversity of opinion. Get US flavored output on sensitive subjects from US models and ZH on ZH models. That's a useful tool.
China is doing open models better. I think there's little going in Hagueseth's head other than the usual reactionary nationalism reflex.
I mean I agree with you, as what I said above is not my position, that's the US government's position.
Companies that are hurt by open weight models fight against them. Companies that benefit from open weight models fight overregulation. Color me surprised.
I don't personally have a horse in this race, but if you want to accurately predict the next step:
Start with the outcome you believe will be the most in line with the spirit and traditions of the open source community. This is precisely what won't happen.
It won't necessarily be the inverse. It could be, of course, but it's also likely to be a compromise between the two.
For a topical example: The companies doing "AI" layoffs aren't doing so out of a sense of having failed their staff that helped carry them so far. Often, these announcements come on the heels of record-breaking profits. They're doing it out of contempt for workers.
See https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/cory-doctoro... for Doctorow's take on centaurs vs. reverse centaurs. Broadly speaking: C-suite business leadership wants reverse centaurs. Workers want centaurs. Unless you have a union (or some other collective bargaining power structure that I'm not aware of), the C-suite calls the shots.
The same can be said of the current administration. They don't give a fuck what most of us want on any given issue. They're captured by an aggressive ideology. Their only incentive is to be able to spin their decision to make themselves look good; to posture as "strong" leadership.
Ideology? I think this administration is the least captured by ideology in the last few decades. It's mostly brazen self-interest, for both entertainment & profit.
It's a mix of grifts, gaffes, and Project 2025.
> Start with the outcome you believe will be the most in line with the spirit and traditions of the open source community
there's nothing open source about an open weight model. It's more like the binary blobs Linux fought so hard against. If you can't compile, or in this case train, from source then you're missing the "source" part of open source.
To be clear: This isn't a technical discussion, it's a political one.
While your point is valid on its own merits, it isn't relevant here.
We demand that possible all avenues to observe, replicate, and resell exogenous value remain uninhibited until ROI and monopoly is achieved!
> Open source did more than lower the cost of software; it created a shared foundation of knowledge on which generations of American engineers and entrepreneurs built their institutional sovereignty
Hey nvidia, what about making your full set of linux drivers open source?
I mean, I do agree that being open is important but you're hijacking the narrative here, and I suspect being open have nothing to do with any of this.
i'm glad someone else sees this too. There's nothing open source about an open-weight model. I feel like they're just trying to associate themselves with open source and the positive impacts it has had on software technolgoy.
Ok, great, so Microsoft believes in open weight models. So... uhh, why not release a few?
They did. Check out the Phi models (e.g., https://huggingface.co/microsoft/phi-4).
Great, how about some frontier models like China seems to be doing on a weekly basis at this point. Give us a CoPilot variant that's open source & open weights.
They could start by releasing the MAI-1 models they announced recently. https://microsoft.ai/models/
Now that their lawyers have cornered everyone trying out open weight models and banned the ones they can, they put out a statement like this.
"the companies with the most to lose saw which way the wind was blowing and switched sides" mightve been an apt title.
Some more discussion on NVIDIA crosspost: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49035751
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Ok, but please don't fulminate or post unsubstantive comments here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It's not worthless, you don't have to agree with P on everything, or make it personal - it works as strictly business - only where and when appropriate.
I agree with the message, but I'm not going to accept it from this particular crowd.
Microsoft, NVIDIA, Meta, Palantir, IBM...They have all been actively hostile to open source for decades, and have a history of embracing it only when convenient and profitable.
Microsoft benefited from its close partnership with OpenAI for years right up until it went sour. Where was this enthusiasm for open weights then?
Meta was developing open models and then abandoned that effort in search for profits. Muse Spark is now fully closed.
All these companies have the resouces to train and release frontier open weights models today, but choose not to. So spare me the marketing and virtue signaling.
I’ll never forgive Microsoft for their hostile actions against open source and open standards in the 90s. I’ll never believe any endorsement from them of open-anything.
Yeah, the endorsement logos at the bottom are majority bad actors with regards to openness in code. Many are bad actors with regards to openness in _society_.
Yeah, never ask a fox to count your chickens.