They need to distance themselves from the increasing likelihood of legal repercussions after their systems have been found to commit what could reasonably be seen as felonies. That’s my guess at least.

Though for once I do actually agree with that specific leader, it’s incredibly annoying how anthropomorphic Claude is. Anthropic went way too far in that direction

They want regulation from the US gov and monopolize the western AI market by making it harder for smaller US or competing Chinese labs to compete with their products. Since LLM intelligence has no moat due to distillation. That’s why they are painting apocalyptic scenarios.

There is a panic because the free lunch of more data is projected to end around mid-2027 and the open-source models are catching up with distillation, and all labs are sitting on debt and valuation that is impossible to fulfill even if they were alone in the market, so you essentially need either:

1) a breakthrough in performance/learning/model

2) regulatory capture to ensure open source models can be labelled as dangerous and banned so you can set the market rules yourself

Only one of the above is risk-free, and just a question of capital/lobbying rather than a "maybe".