Amodei: AI Centralizes Power by Design — Open Models Won't Help

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei explained why open AI models don't actually make the market freer. In his view, AI centralizes power 'by its very structure' — due to scaling laws — and open models 'simply shift the concentration to those with more chips and compute,' meaning back to the large labs. Amodei defends his regulatory proposals by pointing to California's SB 53: small businesses are fully exempt from requirements thanks to revenue and training-cost thresholds.

The argument punctures the popular 'open equals democratic' narrative: if compute resources are concentrated in a handful of companies, their infrastructure still sets the rules of the game for the entire market. Investor Gavin Baker and former White House adviser David Sacks call this a 'false choice' — but the framing itself is already reshaping the logic of regulatory debates across the industry.