Why would Anthropic, a company that just got caught nerfing its own models and surveilling users simultaneously push for a government agency to regulate AI? (Save this)
@DavidSacks and
@chamath have the same answer, and it has nothing to do with safety.
On the exact same day that the Fable 5 backlash was playing out publicly, Dario Amodei published a sweeping policy essay calling for an FAA-style regulatory agency to approve all frontier AI models before release, with government authority to block deployment if an independent auditor deems the model too risky.
The proposal uses the language of safety, cybersecurity, bioweapons, loss of control and the timing was not a coincidence.
The mechanics of what Amodei is proposing reveal the actual target.
An FAA for AI would require every model to pass a pre-release compliance audit before it can be deployed publicly.
Closed models from well-funded labs like Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google can afford compliance teams, legal frameworks, audit pipelines, and the months of runway required to navigate a government approval process.
Open source models cannot.
An open source model, by definition, is already out in the world the moment it is released, it cannot be recalled, audited in advance, or forced through a centralized approval gate.
The regulation would not slow Anthropic down.
It would make open source legally impossible to deploy, effectively eliminating the only class of AI that users can run locally, inspect fully and operate without a third-party vendor deciding what they are allowed to ask.
Sacks called it precisely, it is a preemptive strike against local inference the practice of running a model on your own machine, where no one can profile you, degrade your responses, or cut off your access.
The data on compute concentration makes this even more alarming.
Chamath revealed on the podcast that even today, with open source models technically available, the overwhelming majority of inference compute still flows to the big closed labs, open source runs on a minuscule fraction of the total megawatts in operation.
The market already concentrates power at the top, and a compliance based regulatory framework would institutionalize that concentration permanently.