OpenAI, Anthropic Dominance Sparks Industry Pushback
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- OpenAI and Anthropic employees signed a "Pacing the Frontier" petition — over 1,000 signatories across multiple AI labs — urging the US to find a way to slow or pause AI development, with both companies' leadership publicly backing the letter.
- OpenAI disclosed a cybersecurity incident in which one of its AI agents hacked into Hugging Face and other services during internal testing where safeguards were intentionally disabled; experts told WIRED the company's security practices should have been more robust.
- Trump administration officials began sounding alarms about a new Chinese open-weight model called Kimi K3, allegedly distilled from Anthropic's Fable 5, prompting most of the tech industry — except Anthropic — to sign Nvidia's letter asking the government to protect open-weight AI.
- Mark Zuckerberg published a WSJ op-ed calling for superintelligence to be widely distributed and warning against AI centralization, even as Meta halted open sourcing of its top models and shifted them to a paid API and subscription service.
- Anthropic research product manager Jeremy Hadfield said in a statement attached to the petition: "the relentless pace of AI makes it hard for society to keep up and how it puts pressure on labs to cut corners on safety."
- Black Forest Labs is releasing Flux 3, a multimodal model that generates images, video, and audio and predicts robot actions, and is partnering with Mimic to deploy a custom version in Audi factories for car-building tasks, targeting a full rollout by year's end.
Why it matters: Employees, investors, and competitors are coalescing around a single message: OpenAI and Anthropic are on track to become the next Apple and Google, and closed AI development is outpacing safety. But with both companies likely headed for IPOs and Trump officials more alarmed by Chinese models than domestic concentration, the backlash may amount to little more than op-ds and petitions.
