Anthropic warning revives debate over risks and benefits of open models

Anthropic says GLM-5.3, a model released in August by Chinese company Z.ai, poses a major cyberattack risk because it can be freely downloaded and modified. The warning has revived the debate over whether frontier models should remain closed or be released as open models, a dispute that also involves commercial interests: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang advocates for more open models in the United States, while Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei favors a more cautious approach.

The MIT Technology Review analysis says open models can run on people’s own computers, be retrained and examined internally, which is important for researchers. They can also be combined, compressed and fine-tuned for new applications. Closed models are still more capable: the top eight models on the Artificial Analysis LLM leaderboard were closed at the time of publication. A recent Mozilla report cited by the publication says open models typically cost less, but openness involves a trade-off between safety and democratization.