Anthropic’s Dario Amodei says the company has never called for banning open-weight AI models

Dario Amodei published Anthropic’s formal position on open-weights models on Sunday, breaking a silence that had drawn accusations that the company wanted to ban open-weight AI to protect its business. “Anthropic has never advocated for a ban on open-weights models,” Amodei wrote. “Open-weights models that don’t have dangerous capabilities are a public good.” The post came after Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and dozens of tech companies signed an open letter supporting open weights, and after US officials reportedly considered banning Chinese open-weights models.

Amodei outlined three measures he supports instead of a ban. First, enforcing chip export controls and cracking down on the “rampant smuggling” used to get advanced chips into China, because without US chips, scaling laws prevent China from training models more powerful than American ones. Second, stopping industrial-scale distillation operations that allow Chinese labs to build capable models far more cheaply than training from scratch. Third, mandatory safety testing for all sufficiently capable models, open and closed, regardless of country of origin, with less capable models from startups and academia exempted entirely.

On the Nvidia-backed open letter, Amodei agreed that open weights expand access and competition but disagreed that they necessarily help defenders more than attackers. He cited biological weapons as the sharpest example: a sufficiently capable model might weaponise a pandemic-level virus quickly using widely available materials, while defence against such agents takes years. TNW reported last week that Anthropic’s silence on the open-weights letter was becoming conspicuous as the company that had the most direct commercial injury from distillation. This post is the response.

The distillation point is the most commercially charged. Anthropic accused Alibaba’s Qwen lab of running the largest distillation campaign ever against Claude, using 25,000 fake accounts for 29 million exchanges. Amodei acknowledged that cracking down on distillation is “challenging” because accounts can often only be identified after substantial distillation has occurred. He called for policy intervention rather than relying on any single company’s enforcement. The position is carefully constructed: Anthropic is not against open weights, it is against open weights being built by stealing from its closed models, trained on smuggled chips, and released without safety testing. Whether that distinction survives Washington’s appetite for simpler narratives is the political question the post was written to answer.