Once the weights are out, it makes no sense to ban them in the US while the rest of the world takes advantage of it. But that doesn't mean developers of frontier models shouldn't take steps to prevent their weights from being stolen.
Same situation in protectionism in AI. The rest of the world will simply lap us.
Another shill account I gues
Plus it's not like Anthropic has any technical advantage over the Chinese LLM providers, they just have access to more compute. Once sufficient compute becomes available it's nothing special, the math for LLMs is extremely basic, any reasonably trained CS masters/PhD student can ramp up to SOTA in a year or two.
Anthropic's advantage comes from being an American company. I'll leave you with this quote:
China can draw on a talent pool of 1.3 billion people, but the United States can draw on a talent pool of 7 billion and recombine them in a diverse culture that enhances creativity in a way that ethnic Han nationalism cannot. --Lee Kuan Yew
While selling that LLM API usage, they then capture all the prompts, outputs, and intermediate thinking the LLM does, and then sell those logs to the companies making open-weight models. The open-weight model developers then train on those logs to 'distill' a model.
We used to call that competition.
Imagine making this argument with a straight face in any other industry:
"The claim is that Japanese car companies are buying Ford vehicles, and then leasing them to American consumers at cut-rate prices. In return for the cheap cars, the customers are letting the Japanese observe their driving behavior, studying how they use their F-150 and then the Japanese car companies are applying that data to design new vehicles that will directly replace Ford!"
That's not what they are observing, it is the behavior of the engines.
fine, s/observing the way the Ford cars work