I’m still kind of shocked that Dean Ball can tweet such incendiary stuff about OpenAI policy. Like presumably OpenAI would prefer it if their staff don’t pick fights with Trump administration officials.

The only good arguments I see against open weight AI also apply to closed AI. And regardless, the box is open, nobody can stop it even if stopping it was a good thing.

This post does not mention safety at all. What's to stop bad actors from fine tuning open weights to run fully automated genius-level scams personally targeting basically everybody?

You could literally develop a hyper-intelligent advisor on how to kill people or perform dangerous hacks using ablated 'open source' AI. You can do this right now, this very moment, and have an extremely adept advisor on how to do really, really bad things.

The lobbying dollars don't care

>Much of the angst around China's models centers on "losing the AI race". But what's the goal of this race? Is it to develop the best model? To sell the most tokens? To destroy humanity first?

Some people would say it is reaching some sort of singularity. Even if you don't buy into a more sci-fi interpretation of this, there are pretty grounded arguments one could make that there is some sort of "goal" in AI development that, if realized, would effectively make it a superweapon. Altman has been pretty vocal about his expectation that this will eventually happen and that it is his goal to be the guy to produce it. Even if it isn't some superintelligence, the ability for a machine to do something like, say, exploit cybersecurity weaknesses, is pretty worrying for entities like governments. It's the pretense used when we saw the US government ban a US model recently.

Again, you don't have to buy that "the singularity" is a real thing, but it's not hard to see that some people think some version of this is real and it is exactly what is being referred to as the goal in an "AI race."

I'm in favor of open source AI... however:

> It's theoretically possible for a bad actor to embed hidden adversarial behavior in a model. But if this happens, it serves the interests of responsible actors to find these exploits as soon as possible, and the best way to do this is to let anyone who wants to inspect them.

This is a bad argument. It isn't trivial to tell if the weights have poisoned:

``` https://www.thedeepview.com/articles/microsoft-how-to-spot-a... https://futurism.com/future-society/easy-poison-open-weight-... https://semgrep.dev/blog/2026/ai-supply-chain-problem/ ```

I'm not arguing in favor of closed-AI; I'm simply saying poisoning may be subtle.

I was gonna say that at least the frontier labs may be motivated to not-poison their own models, but then Anthropic just attempted to poison Fable's LLM training capability so... sigh. I'll try not to derail.