Anthropic and OpenAI Are Lobbying Regulators in Washington to Restrict Open-Source Models

IBL News | New York

OpenAI and Anthropic are quietly lobbying Washington regulators to restrict open-source AI models, even as Sam Altman publicly said he supports open-source AI, The New York Times reported yesterday.

The two leading frontier model companies are now publicly clashing with the rest of the tech industry over whether open-source models from China should be freely available or restricted.

David Sacks, Co-Chair, President’s Council of Advisers on Science & Technology, criticized Anthropic and OpenAI, posting:
“The entire tech industry (save for Anthropic) has come out in favor of open source AI. So what happens next? Will Anthropic change its lobbying efforts? Not likely.”

In recent years, Silicon Valley technologists have shown their divide over how AI software should be created, and last week that argument reached a boiling point.

On one side, Anthropic and OpenAI claim that AI models are too dangerous to be developed in the open and must be tightly controlled — by businesses like themselves — for safety. On the other hand, the rest of the tech industry, including giants like Microsoft and Nvidia, contends that open-source AI models must remain open for people to further develop technologies and build new businesses.

On Friday, Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO, posted that open-source software was “essential to a healthy A.I. ecosystem.”  Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s chief executive, said in his first-ever post to X that “the world needs both frontier closed models and frontier open models.”  [see Nvidia’s CEO video below]. Both signed a letter supporting open source, which was also signed by executives at Meta, Palantir and IBM.

The escalating fight stems from China’s rapid progress in open-source AI models, which are freely available to use and build on. In recent weeks, two Chinese start-ups, Z.ai and Moonshot AI, have released models that rival those from Anthropic and other American labs. Anthropic and OpenAI have claimed that Chinese companies built the models by improperly harvesting data from their AI systems, which they said should not be allowed.

But companies like Microsoft and Nvidia, which rely on open-source models to spur demand for their cloud computing services and chips, said that open-source software was important to advancing the technology with shared knowledge and that it would let more people examine its security.

Silicon Valley start-up founders argue that constraining open-source software will cement OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s lead in AI.

 

The entire tech industry (save for Anthropic) has come out in favor of open source AI.

So what happens next? Will Anthropic change its lobbying efforts? Not likely. Now the gaslighting begins:

“Nobody is trying to ban open source.”

“We just want to limit who can use it.”

“We…

— David Sacks (@DavidSacks) July 26, 2026