It's quite rational to regulate frontier API models, especially to get more transparency for the government, without regulating open-source AI.
Here's why:
1. The most dangerous AI systems right now aren't open models. They're the large frontier LLM APIs distributed through coding tools and assistants, because:
- They're built in secret behind closed doors and stay total black boxes. Zero transparency on what they can or can't do, with "safeguards" that blur everyone's ability to even analyze them.
- They're built and controlled by a few profit-maximizing megacorps, concentrating unprecedented power in very few hands, with every incentive to downplay risks and overstate their safeguards.
- They're distributed to hundreds of millions, maybe billions, of people and trivially easy to run.
2. Open-weight models are orders of magnitude less risky:
- They're not as massively distributed or as easy to use, especially the big ones, as APIs and assistants.
- We (including governments) can quickly and accurately analyze what they're capable of, and for now everyone confirms they're not as good as the APIs at doing bad things.
- They're distributed to everyone, so defenders and law enforcement get as much access as attackers.
The cost-benefit analysis of regulation is completely different too. Regulating frontier APIs is relatively easy and low risk while regulating open source would be much more complex, less efficient, and orders of magnitude more costly.
Regulating frontier APIs would only potentially hurt a few megacorps, if it even hurts them, given all the marketing that it is already generating for them. They can afford armies of lawyers and absorb losing a few billion dollars, especially given they're on track to become some of the most valuable companies in history.
Regulating open source, by contrast, would hurt the very people regulation is supposed to protect: small businesses, startups, researchers, nonprofits, universities, independent developers, and the broader public, while risking killing competition, slowing AI progress, and reducing transparency even more!
