Simon Willison Maps Three Competing AI Open Letters, Including 'Pacing the Frontier' Signed by Pachocki, Sutskever, Amodei and Jack Clark
Willison's August 2 post lays out three letters published within five days of each other: Microsoft's 'Open Weights and American AI Leadership' (July 24, 235 companies including NVIDIA, Amazon, Y Combinator, the Linux Foundation, and OpenAI as a later signer, which explicitly endorses distillation as legitimate); Anthropic's 'Our Position on Open-Weights Models' (July 27), which denies ever advocating a ban while calling for a crackdown on industrial-scale distillation; and 'Pacing the Frontier' (July 28), signed by 1,324 frontier-lab employees including OpenAI chief scientist Jakub Pachocki, Ilya Sutskever, Dario Amodei and Jack Clark. The pacing letter asks the U.S. government to back an international effort to deliberately slow automated AI research, and OpenAI and Anthropic both backed it at the company level after it went live. The alignment is the story: the same two labs are on opposite sides of the open-weights letter and the same side of the pacing letter.
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