Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei says AI company isn't advocating for ban of open-weight models

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said on Monday that his company has "never advocated for a ban on open-weights models," an attempt to beat back criticism emerging across the tech industry that the AI lab is trying to exert excessive control over the future of artificial intelligence.

Amodei published his views in a blog post on Monday, after a coalition of tech companies, including Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta and Palantir, released a letter late last week urging policymakers to avoid "premature restrictions" on open-weight models, which users can download, modify and run on their own infrastructure. Chinese startups currently dominate the market, and some government officials have started to weigh whether those models should be banned or restricted in the U.S.

Anthropic is best known for developing a family of proprietary models called Claude that it sells to businesses. Chief rival OpenAI also primarily builds closed models, but the company signed on in support of the open-weight letter after it was published, while Anthropic did not.

"To summarize my and Anthropic's position, we have not and are not advocating for a ban on open-weights models as a category," Amodei wrote. "We should instead focus on keeping powerful chips out of authoritarian hands, stopping industrial-scale distillation, and requiring safety testing of all sufficiently capable models, open and closed."

Distillation is an AI training method where a smaller, less capable model is built using outputs from a bigger model already on the market. Anthropic sent a letter to the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs last month alleging that China's Alibaba, developer of the Qwen family of models, had carried out the "the largest known distillation attack" against it to date.

In the Friday letter, the signatories said that concerns about unlawful distillation should be addressed through "targeted legal and commercial frameworks," an idea that Amodei agreed with on Monday.

Amodei said he also agrees with other portions of the letter, namely that open-weight models give customers greater control, expand access to the AI economy and strengthen competition in some use cases. But he said he disagrees with the idea that open-weight models favor cyber defenders over attackers, or that they make it easier for users to develop safeguards.

Even so, Amodei made it clear that he does not support banning open-weight models.

"Protectionist bans would not address my most serious national security concerns," Amodei said.

WATCH: Anthropic’s new AI model rivals Fable 5 and is cheaper as businesses fret about costs