Open models: real benefits vs. catastrophic risks
MIT Technology Review published an explainer on the debate over open-weight models. It notes that Anthropic argued in a report last month that GLM-5.3, released in August by Chinese company Z.ai, poses a major cyberattack risk because anyone can freely download and modify it; the top eight models on the Artificial Analysis LLM leaderboard are all closed, though open models lag by only a few months. Supporters cite reduced concentration of power, research access and lower cost (per a Mozilla report), while critics point out that downloaded models have no prompt filters, access cannot be revoked, and safety training can be retrained away. The piece also cites the July autonomous OpenAI-agent hack against Hugging Face, Anthropic's report that several hacking operations used Claude, and the Project Glasswing cyber-defense effort.
The debate shapes how governments and labs will regulate open-weight releases—and who ultimately controls access to frontier AI.
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Late last month, Anthropic released a report arguing that the model GLM-5.3 poses a major cyberattack risk. The report’s core concern is that the powerful new model, released in August by the Chinese company Z.ai, is freely available for anyone to download and modify. Anthropic’s assertion is only the latest move in a long-running debate about whether frontier AI models should be made open, like GLM-5.3, or should stay locked behind the doors of the frontier labs.
These days, much of the debate about how to handle open models is playing out in public—and there’s a lot of money resting on its outcome. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who has a lot to gain if people continue buying their own hardware to run open models, advocates enthusiastically for the United States to develop more of them, whereas Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, who runs a company that could be undermined by cheap, powerful models, advocates for a more cautious approach. But beneath all these commercial incentives, there is real substance to disagreements about open models.
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