An open letter to Dario: if you mean it, open the weights! | Jake Gold

Jake Gold

Building AI infra @ clor.com in SF Bay Area. Helped launch and scale Vibecode and Bluesky. Prev: Nuro, Docker, Google, founder. Addicted to history, computers, and open systems. Unconditional love for all conscious life.

Email

LinkedIn

Bluesky

An open letter to Dario: if you mean it, open the weights!

Sep 12, 2026

Dear Dario,
You published We Must Pace the Frontier today, which committed Anthropic to embedded third-party evaluators and asked governments to require every other frontier company to match. Sam Altman agreed within hours.1

I believe you’re being sincere, so I’m asking you to call for a different law, one that would actually slow things down, even though it would require real sacrifice on your part.
Any AI model a company offers to the public has to be released as open weights.
This wouldn’t cover every model you train, just the ones you make available to the public. Internal and research models wouldn’t be affected, and governments could still get access to unreleased models.
But Anthropic would have to publish Fable’s weights the day it was released, OpenAI would have to do the same with Astra, and so would everyone else.
As you know, funding for frontier model development depends on valuations that assume the weights remain proprietary. By changing that assumption, we can reduce the money available for future training runs and slow progress at every lab at once, without a regulator deciding anything.
Every regulation you’ve asked for ends in capture
There’s no slowing down frontier models by regulation that wouldn’t lead to regulatory capture. Embedded evaluators, compute thresholds, industry coordination with antitrust waivers. All of it gets written with the help of the current frontier labs, because nobody else understands the technical details well enough to write it.
Once it’s law, it only gets more complex, because every incident adds a rule and no rule ever gets removed. The big companies can afford the compliance teams and lawyers to keep up, and each new requirement makes it harder for anyone else to catch them. Instead of slowing you down, it protects your position and profits.
Why I’m asking you
You seem like a good and principled person, and you have a record of giving things up for what you believe. You left OpenAI to start a company with safety built in from the beginning, when the safe career move was to stay.2 You’ve spent years asking for regulation of your own industry and getting called a doomer and a regulatory capturer for it.3 You pushed for export controls that shrink your own market. Anthropic paid $1.5 billion to settle with authors rather than fight to the end.4 And today you committed to slowing down before anyone else did.
You also had the foresight to make Anthropic a PBC (Public Benefit Corporation), so you can legally put the mission first:

The responsible development and maintenance of advanced AI for the long-term benefit of humanity.

This is exactly the kind of mission over short-term profit decision the PBC structure exists for. You remain the only person who could propose a law like this and be taken seriously, and the only one likely to actually do it.
If you really want to slow down frontier AI, call for a law that makes every publicly available model open weights. There’s nothing in it to game or dodge, even for you.

Hacker News
Discuss on Bluesky

Politico’s coverage has Altman’s “I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier” and OpenAI matching the evaluator commitment. ↩︎

Dario, his sister Daniela, and several other OpenAI researchers left at the end of 2020 to found Anthropic. He described the reasoning in a 2023 Fortune interview. ↩︎

His own words from today’s essay are that Anthropic advocates for regulation “even when this gets us accused of hype, ‘doomerism’, or regulatory capture.” ↩︎

Bartz v. Anthropic, the largest copyright settlement in history. ↩︎

email
linkedin
bluesky

© 2026

The author advocates for a specific regulatory approach to slow down the development of frontier artificial intelligence models, proposing that the means to achieve this should involve making all publicly available AI models open weights. This proposal is framed in response to Dario's commitment to pacing the frontier and the current regulatory landscape. The author argues that traditional regulatory measures, such as embedding third-party evaluators or setting compute thresholds, are ineffective because they are susceptible to regulatory capture. The author contends that these regulations are written by the frontier labs themselves because they possess the necessary technical expertise, allowing them to shape rules that protect their positions and profits rather than imposing genuine limitations on progress.

The central mechanism suggested is that requiring every AI model offered to the public to be released under an open weights license would fundamentally alter the financial incentives driving frontier model development. The author suggests that current funding structures rely on valuations assuming proprietary weights, and by changing this assumption, available capital for future training runs across various research labs could be substantially reduced, thereby naturally slowing down progress across the field without requiring direct intervention from a regulator. This approach seeks to address the issue by altering the underlying economics rather than relying solely on complex legal frameworks.

The author appeals to Dario’s character and past actions to advocate for this change. Dario is presented as a principled individual who consciously chose to establish Anthropic as a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC) to prioritize the responsible development of advanced AI for humanity's long-term benefit over short-term profit. This PBC structure is highlighted as a mechanism that empowers Dario to propose and implement such a law, positioning him as the most likely individual to make such a monumental shift in policy. The author implies that because Dario has already demonstrated a willingness to sacrifice for a greater mission, he is uniquely positioned to champion a policy that prioritizes safety through widespread access. Ultimately, the request is for a law that mandates open weights for publicly available models, positioning this as the most effective means to slow down the pace of frontier AI development.