The Cyber Risk Discourse is Broken

I’ve had one too many discussions on the cyber risks of open models — where someone assumes that either banning open models happens in a silo (and bad actors will somehow actually be stopped) or that China is a threat and doesn’t care about AI safety — that I feel we’re going to end up making policy decisions that both limit American AI competitiveness and increases long-term cyber risk. I feel like we’re locked in on a path of lose-lose situation, unless people embrace nuance, trade-offs, and scary realities. Open weight models pose an untenable risk to society’s functionality, occupied by frontier lab leadership and the national security community in the U.S. Open weight models pose an untenable risk to society’s functionality, occupied by frontier lab leadership and the national security community in the U.S. Western voices saying open weight models are necessary for defense and banning them will make the world less safe, occupied by AI risk moderates to different extremes. I include myself in this bucket, along with Hugging Face’s perspective after the OpenAI incident, and others like Joshua Saxe. Western voices saying open weight models are necessary for defense and banning them will make the world less…