There are two (very disjoint) opinions that both land in the same place (banning/restricting open-weight models).

1. "We want to own it and be the only megacorp that exists in the future", and

2. "Proliferation of open-weight models is like giving everyone a nuclear reactor in their home: it is extremely dangerous to the world"

Anthropic has previously stated (or, at best, implied) that they believe/have-reason-to-believe the second.

Some other organizations, well the public has every reason to believe they believe the first.

The end result of "hardware shouldn't be capable of running non-validated models" is the same between the two.

I can't comment on which of the two Anthropic is (because I have literally never in my life talked to anyone in an influential leadership position there). Just keep in mind that even people who are diametrically opposed can have matching recommendations (again, for polar opposite reasons).

Framing open-weight AI as "a nuclear reactor in every home" is the exact same paternalistic logic that drove Robespierre’s Republic of Virtue.

The underlying premise from Dario is pretty much that they are the enlightened vanguard who can be trusted with power, while the public is too foolish to have autonomy.

But people will never converge on a single definition of virtue in the standard of Robespierre's ideals. Because people naturally hold conflicting values, Robespierre had to resort to the guillotine to force ideological conformity and erase dissent. You cannot enforce a "Republic of Virtue" without becoming an authoritarian gatekeeper. When Dario demands only certain AI models that we can use, his so-called "safety" stops being a precaution and becomes a tool to impose his values on everyone else. And that, makes him dangerous and disgusting.

Or Nvidia could pull what they did with mining GPU: We want more GPU for gamer, so we release special version that can't run LLM.

Remember their "LHR" GPU

They definitely believe #2 and have been consistent about this since their founding (when they were a no name company nobody used). But HN tends to choose the most cartoonishly evil and conspiratorial takes on these matters because #2 is just boring