Additionally, the financial and technological equilibrium which makes OpenAI or Anthropic possible is rather precarious so they are poking on it, hoping to make it fall.
Think about the history of AWS. Amazon made a very specific point of building, specifically, a “platform”. When they developed a major internal service, they would sell it. Basically anyone who wanted to use it could pay AWS (often an outrageous amount, but it was often worth it), and AWS would provide the service, and AWS was consistently neutral and trustworthy. They didn’t really tell you what you could or couldn’t do, they didn’t even ask what you wanted it for, and they never used your private data for their own purposes. AWS pulled this off quite well despite the fact that competing products and even open source products could and still can, with effort, do most of what AWS offered.
Compare to OpenAI and Anthropic. They want to sell you their front-ends (chatgpt.com, claude.ai, their apps and harnesses), but the big money is selling enterprise contracts with per-token pricing. The latter is the platform.
But their platforms suck in comparison to their open competition. You are paying for inference on a series of models, but:
- You need to negotiate with them if you don’t want them to retain your data.
- They might not even be willing to not retain your data.
- Part of the model output gets encrypted before you see it.
- You are not allowed to give the model arbitrary input.
- They run classifiers on the token stream to try to restrict what you may or may not do.
- You cannot see the model’s internal states.
- You are extremely restricted in your ability to modify the model and you may not be allowed to modify it at all.
- Oh, and maybe the price is above market rates.
The last point is not really a big deal: AWS has demonstrated quite effectively that customers will pay many, many billions of dollars above market rates for a high quality platform.
But I think the rest are a big deal, and the open-weight models allow anyone to use a provider other than Anthropic and OpenAI and avoid all the other problems in the list. This means that, if I’m a startup building a product that uses AI, I get to choose between OpenAI/Anthropic-like terms and a far better alternative. And this makes it very hard for OpenAI or Anthropic to sell me on their platform even at equivalent pricing.
So the real question you should be asking yourself is why you thought that China supported publishing open-weight models, even though they merely didn't prohibit it.
OpenAI had been miniaturizing GPT models as far back as GPT-4o era, but Chinese free-beer models that run on 16GB consumer GPUs can handle the vast majority of LLM use cases, and now they have no options but to attempt development of actual superintelligence that can cure cancer or solve the P=NP question just to differentiate against free-beer alternatives. It's clear what China is trying to achieve.