Anthropic specifically is clearly trying to get the US government to ban open weight models for anticompetitive reasons. So making LLMs seem (or be!) dangerous aligns with their interests very well.

▲ 3form 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That's my view. The end goal is to become Too Big To Fail, the means is stifling the competition and getting military funding.

▲ djierardi 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yeah, maybe. But that doesn't quash gains by China's models. What's the endgame here? The USA "wins" and obliterates China? The ultimate goal seems to be stalemate, as with nuclear arms e.g.

▲ bunderbunder 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This is just run-of-the-mill rent seeking behavior.

A huge chunk of their revenue comes from US-based enterprise customers. Earlier this year, in an effort to become profitable, they tried raising their rates. Those enterprise customers responded, in part, by ramping up efforts to migrate to open weight models. If those efforts are successful then OpenAI and Anthropic will lose their one remaining plausible path to profitability. The US banning open weight models arguably keeps that path open. I don't personally buy that story, but I do believe hedge funds and institutional investors would. That could be all that's needed for a successful IPO.

As for cybersecurity implications, long term impact on domestic AI industry or the US tech industry more broadly, geopolitics, etc., I don't think OpenAI's or Anthropic's leaders are any more worried about that than your average termite is about the structural integrity of the house it's eating.

▲ djierardi 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This assumes that everyone doesn't reach "good enough" at some point. The best developed area here -- software -- seems to suggest a "good enough" plateau, if not an absolute plateau.

▲ xorcist 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> OpenAI and Anthropic will lose their one remaining plausible path to profitability

You forgot about Ads. The one true endgame for every tech company.

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bunderbunder 2 hours ago | parent [-]

OpenAI's leaked financials suggest about a $38bn loss last year. They recently claimed their ad business had an annualized run rate of $1bn. Annualized run rate is a bullshit, non-GAAP, obviously fudged number designed to impress people who've never heard of regression to the mean, but still, let's trust it for the sake of argument. And let's assume that "yesterday's weather" is a good enough estimate for how their overall finances are looking in 2026. That implies that all they need for profitability is to quickly grow their ad revenue by, say, 3,500 - 4,000%.

Easy peasy. Shouldn't be too hard at all.

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xorcist an hour ago | parent [-]

Ads in an LLM, such as nudging users to pick a certain solution or brand, could easily be orders of magnitude more effective than traditional banner ads. Certainly such numbers are possible if you design the product to fit. We have hardly even seen the beginning of that yet.

	▲	bunderbunder an hour ago \| parent [-]
		[dead]

▲ mopsi 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

  > The US banning open weight models arguably keeps that path open.

Difficult to see how that could be implemented in practice. Ok, let's imagine only Anthropic and OpenAI hold a US government license to provide AI services in the US. But what would stop US companies from sending the data overseas for processing? Locking that down would require a huge paradigm shift, given how fast and loose they currently are with their (and especially customers') data.

	▲	bunderbunder 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Like I said in the very next two sentences, I don't believe it would actually work. But it doesn't need to. All they need to do is keep hedge fund managers distracted for long enough to successfully IPO.

▲ Loquebantur 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The endgame is systemic capture.

They stole the collective data of humanity as a whole and now sell it back to you in a rent scheme. Open source will be starved of data and compute.

You're supposed to become dependent on that "service" and slave away at paying for it, while being able to earn anything only in conjunction with it.

Note how difficult it already is to get any up-to-date documentation on anything capable of generating actual market value. A monopoly on competency ensures maximal profits.

	▲	djierardi 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Open source already has the "the collective data of humanity as a whole". That's the LLM leg. Now focus on what they train their models on for RL. Do other models have less code for training coding? for math? Those are pretty much the only cases where we can have reliable validation. Then, what's the next step. So many branches: legal contracs? etc. So much more obscure detail, which is why (I'd guess) so many startups exist in these areas. AGI, I think, is an illusion: you need a whole lot of specialized bots. Heck, when I query a bot wrt something I know nothing about, I'm blown away by its ability to inform me. But when I ask about something I DO know about, its answers are half-assed. Heck, even when it can access the internet, it avoids all the sites that have paywalls, so it sends me to little reddit to conversations that are entirely untrustworthy.

▲ redrix 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

My 2c: Anthropic/OAI have taken 10s of billions of dollars of investment - and there needs to be a return on that investment at some point.

They make their money on token burn. They can’t do that if they’re competing with something that’s 80-90% as capable, but 1/10th of the cost (with the option of deploying it yourself for “free”).

▲ munk-a 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The goal is personal wealth - and scaring nations to the point of diverting even more wealth towards your coffers because of a perceived existential risk.

Wealth accumulation via scare tactics is a classic move of defense contractors and AI firms are quite capable of running the same playbook.

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mullingitover 4 hours ago | parent [-]

> The goal is personal wealth

The goal is power. Having 30 million of personal wealth is enough to retire in luxury and travel the world. They could all have this much right now. That's not what these types of people want.

Having 30 billion gives you the power to order legions of people around, buy and sell politicians, flood ad markets during elections, all with your couch cushion money. That's what motivates these types.

	▲	Terr_ 6 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		That reminds me of a different thesis on power as it relates to LLMs [0], and why rich investors might may be extra-interested in deploying them, as distinct from other kinds of AI: > The fact that a theory-free AI might demand far more cash to accomplish a task (even a "solved" one like playing chess) than an expert would charge is beside the point. Billionaires have money, they don't have expertise. Theory-free inference is a bid to substitute one for the other: the beauty and terror of being able to manipulate the world without studying or understanding it is that it can be done with money alone. No experts needed. > In a world in thrall to financial power, expertise is the only substantial form of power that can reliably contest the power of wealth. Moreover, expertise is the foundation of other forms of power, such as labor power, which is what we call it when experts band together to combat financial power. > This is why AI bosses are so violently allergic to the idea of hybridizing AI with symbolic systems that operate on models of the world. These models of the world must be constructed by experts, and the power of expertise cannot be reliably commanded by the power of wealth. [0] https://pluralistic.net/2026/10/06/nonfungible/
	▲	antonvs 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		You're right, although I think the power is a means to end. The actual end is trying to fill some kind of bottomless psychological hole.

▲ hpcdude 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[dead]

▲ Ygg2 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

No, the end goal is selling $200 of tokens for $200k out of taxpayers wallet. Via DoD contracts.

	▲	djierardi 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Hah!

▲ 999900000999 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

US companies which seek to do any business with the government will be forbidden from using free Chinese models.

As is a 2000$ gaming laptop can a run a basic llm which is probably good enough for most basic programming.

Most companies are going to be forced to use “safe” LLMs and pay by the token. Maybe for half a million Anthro will let you host on site, but even this will face usage fees or caps.

	▲	djierardi 36 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		So ultimately a huge penalty on companies that must use US AI, ceding a huge advantage to global-exUS competitors. Game over.

▲ 4dd3aa 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Its not gonna work.

At this moment in time, it seems frontier market needs regulation - market for open does not actually.

Oh.. they dont want regulation on that market? Boohoo!

▲ djierardi 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Ban means what? That the entire world (ex USA) can use open-weight models? Not a win.

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munk-a 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Before the tariff spree and general unpredictability the US could likely have muscled most of the rest of the world into following suit - now, not so much.

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pixl97 4 hours ago | parent [-]

I somewhat disagree, there are some real arguments about making high end LLMs classified as a dangerous and restricted product that will apply to all nations. They may not agree to the US rules, but almost everywhere will have restrictions sooner or later.

Don't get me wrong, I want a world of open models, but I don't see us living in that world in our current trajectory.

	▲	solyin 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Depends on how much of the world you see running on hacked copies of Windows and pirated versions of Photoshop, as there's already huggingbay.xyz. In a legit company you'd never run pirate Windows and Photoshop, because that's illegal, but to pretend half the world doesn't run on that would be ignorant. The same security risk is there with open models - if you're not looking at the code it generates, it could be putting in backdoors to your code and you'd never know, so no legit company is going to be running off some abliterated model they downloaded from huggingbay, but again, it would be naive to think that open models are going away.

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pixl97 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

If the US declares LLM models munitions then it makes it much more difficult to easily use them. Illegal use of weapons of war can get you banned from SWIFT.

Other than China the rest of the world has dick for capacity to run models. Even China is at 1/10th the US is and is at to stay for a considerable amount of time.

▲ ddxv 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I agree. I hope developers put their token budgets into open weight models rather than funding the banning of open weight models.

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joshheitzman 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I've been using only open weight models since February. My OSS coding agent harness ( https://fluximp.org ) only supports open weight model providers.

Not supporting closed models was initially an ideological choice, but it became a technical choice as the context management approach I've implemented requires the full reasoning to be available. All of the closed models are now keeping the full reasoning server side only.

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verdverm 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Fireworks is a good enterprise choice

OpenCode-go is a good personal subscription choice

I use both

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ddxv 5 hours ago | parent [-]

I've been using OpenRouter, absolutely loving how cheap it is too.

	▲	verdverm 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I cannot bring myself to pay their 5% surcharge and also have concerns about routing to vendors I do not want to use

▲ redrix 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

100% agree. I think OAI is too, but more subtly.

Both have taken huge amounts of investment money, and those shareholders will come knocking for their returns at some point.

They make money on token use, but that’s hard to do when China is launching models that are 80-90% as capable, cost 1/10th, and can be deployed for “free”.

I imagine they’re also pissed that most of the Chinese models are distilled from their own (the irony being that they scraped the entire internet to train their own ones).

▲ zer00eyz 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Cryptography, DeCSS ... we have a long history of trying to block things like this and it simply not working.

There is a long, convoluted set of legal arguments that are going to make the weights of a model "facts", rather than "code" making it even harder to "ban". Furthermore having them not be "facts" is going to open up a whole other legal argument about what they are and what the attribution is.

I suspect that they are fishing for a case, so a judge can set some precedent.

	▲	pixl97 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		You're going about this backwards. They don't have to ban models. They ban the consolidation of compute without a license. This will be far easier and already has legal precedent.