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

Anthropic founder and CEO Dario Amodei responded on Monday afternoon to murmuring in the industry that his company somehow supports efforts by the U.S. government to ban open-weight Chinese models, or possibly open-weight models generally.

“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,” he wrote, emphasis his own.

His response came after Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang took to X (his first post on the platform) to share an open letter on Friday in which Nvidia and a long list of other AI companies including Hugging Face, Meta, Microsoft, Mistral, and Nvidia urged policymakers not to impose broad “premature restrictions” on open-weight AI models.

While that letter did not mention China specifically, the debate in the industry has centered on allegations that Chinese AI labs are growing in capability often by stealing intellectual property from their American counterparts. One method is distillation, where an AI bombards another model with prompts to learn how it works.

Amodei said in the blog post published Monday that he views open-weight models as falling into a different bucket than the threat China poses. “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.”

Amodei said in his post that he has longstanding fears about AI, but businesses using open-weight models, even ones from China, are not among them.

His fear is that “authoritarian governments” will build models that are more powerful than those in the U.S. to achieve “permanent military superiority” and/or use AI to repress their own people. He said the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) isn’t the only authoritarian government he’s concerned about, but it is the “most capable.”

Amodei also said he fears AI will enable “biological attacks” not just cybersecurity ones. And, in his view, open-weight models are more dangerous in those scenarios because it’s difficult to apply guardrails to them or monitor their usage. He also noted, citing a UK AI Security Institute report, that once open-weights are released they cannot be withdrawn

This runs counter to what open source advocates argue: that access to powerful open models not controlled by a single entity helps defenders protect themselves.

Amodei listed actions he believes would thwart China, including restricting its access to powerful chips (which has been a longstanding U.S. policy) and calling for a formal crackdown on distillation. The U.S. has threatened sanctions against China if it determined there was IP theft involving U.S. models.

Interestingly, Amodei also said he supports growing efforts, some led by the U.S., to create a model safety testing organization, especially if the entire world, including China, agreed to submit to it.

“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 wrote.

“Note that to be effective,” he added, “testing would need to be global, which means even the CCP would need to be on board. I think this may actually be possible … limited cooperation around preventing AI biological weapons may be possible because it is in China’s interest too.”