The Two Labs Selling Closed Models Have Been Quietly Lobbying Against Open Ones

The public version of the open-weights argument has the American AI industry lined up against restrictions. The private version, according to five people close to the discussions, is that the two companies selling access to closed frontier models — OpenAI and Anthropic — have been lobbying Washington regulators to restrict open-source AI.

What was reportedly asked for

The concrete ask attributed to OpenAI executives is mandatory security evaluations of new AI models, overseen by government agencies. That is not a ban, and it is worth stating precisely: an evaluation requirement is a compliance cost, and compliance costs fall hardest on whoever cannot absorb them — which, in open-weight distribution, is everyone downstream of the model rather than the lab that trained it. OpenAI said publicly it was encouraged by such a framework.

Two companies, two different positions

The headline framing — “OpenAI and Anthropic lobby against open source” — flattens a real distinction, and flattening it is the main distortion in circulation. Anthropic has argued against open weights openly and on the record for months; there is no gap between its public and private positions, and reporting it as a revelation misstates the story. The newsworthy part is specific to OpenAI: the distance between what Sam Altman says publicly about supporting open source and what the company’s allies are reported to be doing privately. A second caution belongs here too — the lobbying claim rests entirely on anonymous sourcing, and neither company confirmed it on the record.

The government's framing

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has put the case in intellectual-property terms rather than safety terms: “Open source is not open season on American IP.” Presidential science and technology adviser Michael Kratsios has likewise treated AI models as valuable American intellectual property. That is a different argument from the safety case usually made for restricting weights, and it points toward different remedies.

Why this reframes the week

An industry letter urging Washington not to restrict downloadable models has been gathering signatures all week and now carries 50 names. Read alongside this reporting, that letter stops looking like an industry consensus and starts looking like one side of a fight — with the same regulators being worked from both directions at once.