Techdirt's counter: Anthropic opposes banning open weights while proposing to ban the thing that makes them cheap.

Mike Masnick's July 29 piece dissects the position and lands a charge worth sitting with: "Testing catches dangerous capabilities regardless of how the model got them. The distillation crackdown adds nothing on safety. It only serves to kneecap cheaper competition." He further argues mandatory pre-release testing becomes compliance theater only incumbents can afford, reconcentrating the market Anthropic says it wants open. I don't think the distillation clause is purely anticompetitive, there's a real IP argument underneath it, but Masnick is right that it isn't a safety argument and shouldn't be sold as one.