Nathan Lambert

Sigh. I wrote this post below, but then I didn't post it because I am tired of the consistent pushback I get from folks with the same safety worldview as Anthropic. I guess that means I should send it. Here goes! This post is pretty solipsistic and doesn't properly take recent events in cyber risks into it's discussion. It is really hard for me to watch how the US frontier labs like Anthropic don't have the ability to consider other approaches to safety and ways things could play out. It insinuates that Z ai (Chinese lab, builds GLM series) doesn't really care about safety and is reckless to take their business strategy. Saying things like "Given this evidence, we think it's likely both state and non-state actors will use models like GLM-5.3 to cause real-world harm." and "This is unlike any other similarly capable AI model, all of which were released with safeguards or through limited access programs." while closed models have been used on more of the documented cyber attacks is just bowing out of the interesting question. A plausible view is that open model weights and closed model apis (with some safe guards) are both far closer to being easy to mis-use, rather than API models being closer to safe. The trope "Open Dangerous, Closed Safe" may be closer to "Open Unsafe, Closed Unsafe" Closed models have stronger capabilities and stronger safeguards, but the stronger capabilities part could matter more in net harm if both the safeguards are porous. At the same time, as the authors do acknowledge (thanks - thats progress!), open models without extreme cyber guardrails are important to rapidly diffuse cyber readiness in the economy -- as programs like project glasswing are not perfect in getting all critical industry onboarded. There will be more issues like the time when Fable was released and Amazon found a workaround, which allowed them to access the full capabilities of the model served readily at an API. The blog overall is reasonable in it's narrow line, but it's a very effective tool in a complicated, rapidly evolving media ecosystem to reinforce a certain type of safety thinking.