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Please elaborate on what the AI labs are specifically requesting and how that results in slowing down Chinese model progress below the frontier.

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Cracking down on proliferation of open models which can't be locked down using the kind of guardrails that Anthropic/OpenAI/etc insist are keeping the public safe from all manner of nefarious bioweapons, hacker swarms, propaganda bots, etc. They've discovered they can't meaningfully slow Chinese model progress, so the next best option is to knock them out of competition in the enterprise market for any American company.

Both Anthropic and OpenAI leaders have repeatedly made this exact argument that it's impossible for open models to rigorously enforce the same kind of safety framework as proprietary cloud-served models. It's implicitly part of any regulatory framework they advocate or else it wouldn't be "fair" to American companies since Chinese models would "cheat" (provide weights).

This is true, and it's a good point. I agree that open weight model regulation would either limit the intelligence of open weight models below the frontier or kill them entirely. It would not prevent closed weight Chinese models, but those aren't really tenable in American enterprises unless they strike deals with American cloud providers to deploy them, via products like Bedrock. I unfortunately also have seen no evidence that we can put any sort of guardrails on open weight models whatsoever and so am reluctantly convinced that they should be regulated below the frontier until such a time as someone comes up with a mechanism that is not circumventable.

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