Leaders Demand Full Speed, Even When They Doubt the Pace

The Rift Over Openness

In recent weeks, the US government has received a series of open letters with completely contradictory demands. On one side is the Open Weights and American AI Leadership campaign, signed by 235 companies including Microsoft, Amazon, and Nvidia. The goal is to prevent any restrictions on open-weight models for security reasons. Microsoft explicitly defends distillation (training smaller models on the outputs of larger ones) as a legitimate tool of innovation, not theft.

Who is Afraid of Acceleration

A completely different tone is struck by the Pacing the Frontier petition, signed by over 1,300 employees and leaders from companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, including Dario Amodei and Ilya Sutskever. They ask the government to help pace the development of artificial intelligence. They warn of intense competitive pressure and the risk of AI being misused by authoritarian regimes or terrorists for biological attacks.

Fear of Their Own Shadow

The contradiction highlights an interesting dynamic. Those who are furthest ahead (Anthropic and OpenAI) are most afraid of the pace they themselves have set. Anthropic admits that 80% of their code is already written by their own Claude model, and OpenAI announced a 20% reduction in inference costs thanks to internal optimization. They fear that automated research will soon spiral out of control and accelerate development beyond a sustainable limit.

The Government as Arbiter of Pace

The government will soon have to decide who to listen to. Whether to heed the large technological coalition that sees safety in openness and transparency, or the narrow group of top researchers who see the only path in secrecy and controlled deceleration.

Lilith's verdict

Microsoft is lobbying to legally siphon off competitors' work, while leaders from Anthropic and OpenAI are pushing the government to pull up the drawbridge behind them. It's hard to believe they're doing this for global safety rather than to maintain a monopoly.