Everyone Is Freaking Out About OpenAI and Anthropic’s Race for Dominance

last week in my home state of New Jersey, but when I got back to Silicon Valley, everyone was panicking again about how quickly artificial intelligence is advancing. While this is certainly not the first time I’ve seen such concerns, it’s the biggest anxiety attack I’ve seen in years.

More than 1,000 employees at OpenAI, Anthropic, and other AI labs signed a petition earlier this week arguing the US should find a way to “pace” the AI race—a diplomatic way of saying the industry should have the option to coordinate a temporary pause on AI development, or slow things down if they get out of hand. OpenAI and Anthropic themselves ended up supporting the letter.

The petition arrived a week after OpenAI revealed it had caused an unprecedented cybersecurity incident in which one of its AI agents hacked into Hugging Face’s platform and several other services during internal testing.

Around the same time, top Trump administration officials started freaking out about an impressive new Chinese open weight AI model called Kimi K3, which was allegedly distilled from Anthropic’s Fable 5. In response, most of the tech industry—except Anthropic—signed onto an open letter from Nvidia asking the US government to protect open-weight AI models, arguing they’re a necessary counterbalance to their closed counterparts.

These events might look like a whole bunch of disjointed chaos. But I think they are evidence of a larger worldview taking hold in Silicon Valley, where many tech insiders are increasingly worried about OpenAI and Anthropic’s dominance. Researchers and investors I’ve talked to recently have framed the AI industry as a two-horse race that doesn’t seem to be slowing down, and that’s a cause for concern.

But different groups have their own reasons to be worried. Some OpenAI and Anthropic staffers think their employers are behaving recklessly in their pursuit to take over the market, and that the AI industry may soon develop models that are too capable for current safety methods to contain. They have said as much in public statements attached to this week’s Pacing the Frontier petition.

“I've seen how 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,” Jeremy Hadfield, a research product manager at Anthropic, said in a statement attached to the petition.

For some AI employees, the Hugging Face debacle was a warning shot that demonstrated how OpenAI’s efforts to mitigate the risks of its most capable AI technology are already falling short. Granted, the incident happened when OpenAI was testing an AI model on its ability to find software exploits, and the company had intentionally turned off safeguards designed to rein in its cybersecurity capabilities.

OpenAI said in its postmortem that these tests were conducted in a sandbox, but the model ultimately gained access to the open internet. Some experts previously told WIRED that OpenAI’s security practices should have been more robust.

Other groups in Silicon Valley are more worried about power than safety. Venture capitalists, tech executives, and startup founders are concerned that OpenAI and Anthropic will simply become the next generation of Apple and Google, forcing the rest of the tech industry to play by their rules. It is slightly strange to argue that private startups with little to no profit are acting like monopolies, but that’s the lens through which many—including Mark Zuckerberg—are starting to view the two biggest AI labs.

The Meta CEO wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed this week warning against the centralization of power in the AI industry, saying that superintelligence should be widely distributed. Zuckerberg is arguably talking out of both sides of his mouth—Meta recently decided to stop open sourcing its best AI models and instead offering them through a paid API and subscription service, just like OpenAI and Anthropic.

The Meta CEO may have been trying to send a specific message to regulators and the industry. Reading between the lines, I think he’s basically saying “we need to make sure OpenAI and Anthropic don’t run away with AI.” Zuckerberg is far from the first technology leader to raise that concern.

I’m not convinced these op-eds and petitions will do much to stop the meteoric rise of OpenAI and Anthropic. Large swaths of the economy are counting on the two AI giants to have successful IPOs, and I’m not sure anyone—let alone the Trump administration—is interested in messing that up. But the tech industry is growing increasingly nervous about the pace of closed AI development, and that’s unlikely to change any time soon.

Why AI Video Startups Are Entering Robotics

All that said, I still wouldn’t overlook how good open models are getting. Black Forest Labs, a German startup that releases some of the world’s most popular open weight AI image and video generators, announced last week it was releasing a new model that could also power robots. The startup aims to put out an open version of Flux 3 in the coming weeks, which developers can use to generate images, videos, and audio, as well as predict robot actions.

“We clearly are stepping from a pure image generation lab to a frontier multimodal AI Lab, which to me is highly important,” Black Forest Labs CEO Robin Rombach said in an interview with me earlier this week. “We are showcasing an intuition which our research team has always had, which is that these models are very general and develop a solid understanding of the real world.”

Black Forest Labs is the latest startup to apply its AI video models to the physical world. Earlier this year, OpenAI shelved its AI video generation product Sora entirely and folded the team behind it into the company’s secretive robotics unit. Other AI video startups, like Runway, have also made a push into powering robotics in recent years.

These companies are broadly betting that AI video models can develop an understanding of real-world physics. While it’s a fascinating application of the technology, it could also represent a way for companies to generate revenue from models that are very expensive to develop.

Most robot foundation models today are vision-language-action models—Google's Gemini Robotics is the best-known—that combine video inputs with written instructions and output motor commands. Rombach says Flux 3 skips the language layer entirely, translating video directly into actions, an approach he argues is more robust.

Black Forest Labs is working with another startup, Mimic, to build a custom version of Flux 3 that powers car-building robots in Audi’s factories. Stephan Gravert, the chief product officer of Mimic, says it’s currently testing and deploying the Flux-mimic AI model with Audi. His team has found that it’s particularly good at powering robot hands to put flexible parts—such as window seals and cables—onto the cars. Gravert says Mimic is planning a full rollout of the technology with Audi by the end of the year.

I had to ask Rombach about the debate over open versus closed AI, especially because Black Forest Labs signed Nvidia’s open letter asking the US government to protect open weight models. “A general ban of open weight models, in my opinion, would be stupid,” says Rombach. “You really run into issues around transparency, safety, sovereignty, and the speed of innovation. I think it would be a very short-sighted decision.”

Rombach has good reason to care about this issue. The cofounders of Black Forest Labs have long punched above their weight, competing with American AI giants like Meta, Google, and OpenAI with far fewer resources. But it might not be able to do so indefinitely: Rombach told me the startup used more computing power than ever to train Flux 3, and it now has over 100 employees. Black Forest Labs raised $300M at a $3.25B valuation last year, but I have a feeling it will need more capital soon to keep up.

This is an edition of Maxwell Zeff’s Model Behavior newsletter. Read previous newsletters here.