David Sacks calls Anthropic and OpenAI a duopoly, and says they want to use the government to eliminate their open source competition
Some context below
- David Sacks pushed back against Dean Ball (OpenAI) over AI regulation strategy who suggested the Trump admin direct federal agencies to issue "soft law" warnings that create FUD around Chinese open-weight models like Kimi, without needing an outright ban or strong evidence. The goall here is to make regulated companies shy away from them.
- This comes right after Chinese labs dropped open-weight models rivaling the latest Fable/ChatGPT-5.6 class in capabilities.
- A few days earlier, Demis proposed a US-led, FINRA-style self-regulatory body for frontier AI. The idea here is voluntary (then potentially mandatory) pre-release safety testing, up to 30 days, for models above certain capability thresholds. And it would apply to all models regardless of origin!
- Ball’s FUD approach looks like the practical enforcement mechanism for exactly this kind of framework -> create enough regulatory risk to keep advanced Chinese open-weights out of the US market in practice.
- Sacks called it what it is regulatory capture.
- He thinks that deliberately manufacturing uncertainty instead of using transparent, evidence-based rules undermines the rule of law and hands a massive advantage to today’s closed-source leaders (Anthropic, OpenAI).