Anthropic published a policy note on July 27 stating it has never advocated banning open-weights models. Instead it backs three narrower levers: chip export controls on China, action against industrial-scale distillation, and mandatory pre-release safety testing for every sufficiently capable model, open or closed.
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Transcript
Anthropic just went out of its way to say something it's been misquoted on for years. It has never asked anyone to ban open weight models. Dario Amodei put it flatly: Anthropic has never advocated for a ban. What it actually wants is three narrower things. Keep advanced chips out of China. Go after industrial scale distillation, that's when someone copies an expensive model just by hammering its API, not by downloading a file. And put every sufficiently capable model through safety testing before release, open or closed, same rule. That timing matters. Moonshot's Kimi K3 just shipped its weights and scores ninety three point four percent on SWE bench, independently measured. Restricting the frontier and restricting open source used to mean the same thing. They don't anymore. The real fight is distillation, and nobody's figured out how to write that rule down yet.