Restricting chips and stopping industrial-scale distillation is the effective way to slow a rival's frontier, and licensing models is not.

Who asserts it

• Our position on open-weights models dario-amodei-position-open-weights-models-2026-07-27
• We Must Pace the Frontier dario-amodei-we-must-pace-the-frontier-2026-09-12

To summarize my and Anthropic's position, we have not and are not advocating for a ban on open-weights models as a category. We should instead focus on keeping powerful chips out of authoritarian hands, stopping industrial-scale distillation, and requiring safety testing of all sufficiently capable models, open and closed.

- **We should not sell powerful chips or chipmaking equipment to China**, and we should crack down on the rampant [smuggling](https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/three-charged-conspiring-unlawfully-divert-cutting-edge-us-artificial-intelligence)[^3] and workarounds used to obtain access to such chips. China has limited domestic production capacity, and therefore, due to the [scaling laws](https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.08361), cannot build more powerful models than the US without US chips.

- Do not sell powerful AI chips or semiconductor manufacturing equipment to China, and crack down on chip smuggling operations and remote access to data centers outside China. Chips will be the main determinant of China’s AI strength. - Crack down on unauthorized [distillation](https://www.cisa.gov/news-events/cybersecurity-advisories/aa26-251a) by companies in authoritarian countries. Distillation of frontier models allows lagging companies to narrow the gap using a fraction of the cost it would take to develop their own AI independently.