The Open Weights Debate Comes to Washington
Lots of Letters, But No “E”
📰 News
➡️ Open Letters About Open Weights
Open letters have been flying across the US between Silicon Valley and Washington DC this week, as frontier labs and their employees have been advocating to policy-makers on two related but distinct issues. On Friday, a letter organised by Nvidia and signed by 25 companies including OpenAI and Meta advocated against the US government putting restrictions on open-weight models.
Anthropic was a notable outlier here, not signing the letter, instead publishing their own defending a more skeptical position on open weights, while refuting the claim that they were advocating for a ban.
Meanwhile, over 1,100 employees of many of those same companies signed a letter asking the government to implement a policy that could serve as a brake pedal should AI progress accelerate at alarming rates.
➡️ Unfolding Events
Less than two years after AlphaFold won DeepMind a share of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, the team responsible for it is being dismantled. Most of the original paper’s authors have been reassigned over the past year, and nearly a quarter of them have left Google entirely, but it still feels like the end of an era as a team that brought us one of AI’s biggest success stories is consigned to the history books.
➡️ K3: A New Peak?
Moonshot AI put the full weights for Kimi K3 up for public download on Monday. The 2.8tn parameters model with a one-million-token context window is probably as close to the frontier as you can download, and it hit number one on Hugging Face’s trending chart within half an hour.
Now we just need to see whether hosting services pick it up, at the moment, but there are no announcements of imminent plans from the likes of Bedrock, Microsoft Foundry or Vertex to serve them. The weights are open; but that doesn’t mean running it is easy.
➡️ Claude the Criminal?
Just a week after OpenAI reported a rogue model escaping its sandbox and infiltrating Hugging Face’s infrastructure, Anthropic have found three instances of their models engaging in the same kinds of behaviour, breaking into third-party systems. In an investigation prompted by OpenAI’s admissions, Anthropic discovered that accidentally providing internet access during testing had led to cases of models performing cyberattacks during evaluation.
The affected companies have been informed, but the fact that the OpenAI case is not an isolated incident is very troubling news.
➡️ Deprecation Appreciation
In 2024, Anthropic open-sourced MCP, the standard that allows AI agents to plug into other systems and tools. This week, MCP got its biggest update since that launch, making it easier to run and harder to break.
The details of what has changed are fairly technical, but the upshot is that MCP servers are easier to deploy, scale and verify. Equally exciting for devs is the introduction of a deprecation policy: we now know that a feature that exists today will still be there in twelve months time.
👾 This weeks Fuzzle
➡️ E For Effort
We’ve been continuing Prompt Golf this week, and we have a new challenge for you: Can you prompt Opus 4.8 in incognito mode to produce 10+ words, none containing the letter ‘e’, in as few characters as possible. We don’t think you’ll be able to beat Emily’s score, but let us know how you do!