Why did the US Government Replace Anthropic with OpenAI?

Anthropic's rival OpenAI took its spot as primary AI supplier to US Government after its feud with Anthropic on dropping guardrails, popularising Claude

TL;DR

US Government shifts primary AI supplier from Anthropic to OpenAI.
Dispute arose over Anthropic's refusal to drop safeguards for autonomous weapons and surveillance.
Anthropic labeled a 'supply chain risk' by the Pentagon.
OpenAI filled the gap, becoming the main AI supplier for federal agencies.
Anthropic's Claude model surged in popularity due to public attention.
Federal agencies like State, Treasury, and Health and Human Services are switching to OpenAI's GPT-4.1.
Defence contractors like Palantir are also removing Anthropic's AI.
OpenAI claims its agreement has more guardrails than previous ones, including Anthropic's.
OpenAI has three main 'red lines': no mass domestic surveillance, no directing autonomous weapons, and no high-stakes automated decisions.

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clem 🤗 reposted

Tommy

As Chinese AI models go closed source, and all U.S. frontier models are closed, there is a massive opportunity for a western open source AI Lab

A future lack of competitive open source AI models is a net negative for humanity, low cost intelligence and sovereignty

Yann LeCun reposted

alphaXiv

As believers of open research, we are disappointed to see Anthropic silently degrading Fable 5 for AI development

"Any topic related to building pretraining pipelines, distributed training infrastructure, or ML accelerator design... may have limited effectiveness through Claude via methods such as prompt modification, steering vectors, or parameter-efficient fine-tuning."

Not only do they get to decide what you use LLMs for in research, but this also enables them to silently intervene in your research without you knowing.

This sets a dangerous precedent. If a model refuses openly, users can understand the boundary. If a model falls back to another model, users can still evaluate the difference. But if a model silently modifies or weakens its own answers while still pretending to help, researchers lose the ability to know whether a failed result came from their own idea, their implementation, or an invisible intervention by the model provider.

That is not safety. Safety policies should be transparent, auditable, and user-visible.

On top of that, the people most harmed by this are not the largest labs with massive teams and proprietary infrastructure. It is the independent researchers, academic groups, startups, and open-source builders who rely on public tools to compete, innovate, and pioneer AI for everyone else.

clem 🤗 reposted

Simon Willison

Very pleased to hear Anthropic have walked back this policy https://t.co/8eOBDzTbCs https://t.co/DnW0h6feV8

clem 🤗 reposted

Chubby♨️

All the major news outlets agree: The biggest winner in the Anthropic controversy is open source.

And I wholeheartedly agree. I said it a few days ago, and I'll say it again: it's the biggest PR win for open source ever.

Whether it's Bloomberg, Fortune, or CNBC: the consensus is clear:

"Making the model open means that companies, governments or organizations with sufficient hardware can run it locally, and never have to worry about it being yanked on a whim." (Bloomberg)

The reason is as simple as it is straightforward: Companies and entire alliances of states that have had their access cut off overnight will look for a sovereign solution that makes them relatively insensitive to shutdowns. By far the most significant and powerful open-source models come from China. This has, in effect, done China a great favor, probably unintentionally.

Open source is essentially a lifeline, the opportunity to continue participating in this revolution with the assurance of independence. That's why the GLM 5.2 release was so important and came at precisely the right time. Open source is the solution.

clem 🤗

Tired: The US government regulating open-source AI models

Wired: The US government training and releasing open-source AI models

clem 🤗 reposted

The Information

Open source AI is gaining traction due to the White House’s clampdown on Anthropic & OpenAI.

“A lot of founders and developers have been burned by trying to build apps on top of these really advanced closed source models, like Fable for instance…”

“… and then seeing those models get taken down or removed from the market just days later.” — @steph_palazzolo, AI Reporter

David Sacks reposted

The All-In Podcast

David Sacks: Anthropic Is Trying to Crush Open Source AI and the American Developers Who Use It

@DavidSacks:

“I know people don't have a lot of sympathy for Chinese companies, that's fine. I'm not defending Chinese companies.

I'm defending American developers who need to be able to use everything in the public domain.

And let me give you an example. Cursor rolled out its new product, Composer 2. They were able to post-train that model using Kimi K2.5 on their own proprietary coding data.

They started with a Chinese open source model, and then they used their own data, and they came up with a new derivative product.

This is the way that open source works. You take things that are in the public domain, you fork them, you make them your own.

And by the way, once it's in the public domain, it's not a Chinese model anymore. No data is going back to China, nothing's going back to China.

An American company has taken open source contributions in the public domain, made it their own, and then developed their own model.

And if you say that American companies can't do that, or that somehow it's tainted with IP theft, you are basically going to put a dagger through the heart of the entire American open source ecosystem.

And that is exactly what Anthropic wants, because they do not want to have the competition.”

David Sacks

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 just want to limit who can contribute to it.”

“We just want to limit how powerful those models can be.”

“We just want to make sure the guardrails (we lobbied for) can’t be removed.”

The net effect will be the same. They won’t stop until they kneecap open source. The rest of the industry needs to watch these guys like a hawk.

Sam Altman

lol another one of the things i like most about openai is tibo

clem 🤗 reposted

Amir Efrati

open source AI is...happening? :)

Anthropic & OpenAI better hope AT&T is the exception, not the rule https://t.co/Bc2KwCTMh1