Very fair point, taken. So, setting aside Anthropic & Co's motivations: trying to restrict this is pointless without planetwide cooperation - I don't see China complying - and likely to just result in dividing people into haves and have-nots. Furthermore, allowing this access, nay, power, into the hands of the very crappy stewards around at the moment doesn't really protect anyone, just makes them richer. I'd stomach their endless lust for more money if it was just a side effect of making the world secure, but I don't see that happening either. What do you realistically do when China keeps advancing the SOTA? And really, all the other nations I mentioned - they're one leak (and a few H200s) away from acquiring the ability anyway. They don't need the ability to serve 250 million concurrent users to be dangerous, just a handful of instances in the hands of their government officers. Who are we withholding the knowledge from, at that point? For what benefit?
I won't even touch the point that this is.... ultimately, knowledge acquired by scraping the internet, so it should belong to everyone - and now they're even pissed off someone is "stealing it back" by distillation - nice discussion for another time.
Furthermore - this approach worked for nuclear weapons for a while as the material is really hard to source, supercomputers weren't available, centrifuges are hard, and good nuclear scientists were so few that they could be individually monitored or assassinated if they helped the wrong party (really). Fast forward to present day when there's no practical way to prevent NK or Iran from advancing their knowledge. We're trying the same obsolete approach, but it applies even less thanks to the Internet. Also, even then, a couple leaks in the 50s gave the soviet union parity - any parallels to our scenario?
I really appreciate your points, I agree with the danger, but I don't see any approach really fixing the situation, and those guys' proposal is just a get even richer quick scheme.
Finally, of all people, finally a day came where I find myself in full agreement with Zuck (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/28/technology/mark-zuckerber...). Obviously his motivation is also not lost on me - this is bad only because it's not him this time, but still, even a (morally) broken Zuck is occasionally right.