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They sure made it sound that way. So, okay, they get what they want. How does it benefit them? They get a big moat? they get to use the regulation to keep everyone else from competing with them? Is there some other way this benefits them?
Incentives dictate they want regulatory capture, same way drug companies created the FDA, meat packers the USDA, Banks the Fed, etc
Question is did this backfire, or going better than expected... We can only speculate
This is great PR from a commercial standpoint, it just upped the value of gaining access. They couldn't sell a lot of it anyway because they're compute constrained, now they can sell it for 10x margin to megacorps that can deal with the export control frameworks and will spare no expense on security audits
Other possibility is their handlers expect to get back into power eventually, and ban any competition that doesn't fold into their globalist apparatus, so they're acting as tip of the spear on "safety" and setting the stage for Anthropic becoming the AI equivalent of the BBC/NBC/CBC... To protect you obviously.
Now, assuming patriots are in control... there's potential for a Goldilocks scenario...
Use the state as the communists would before they can, make things extremely difficult for Anthropic, just as they would do to others if it was their people were in control
Do this with the goal of having them try to work around it as we would
But, instead of closing the door to that workaround, leave it so wide open via precedent it becomes impossible to shut in the event power is lost
This door probably looks like open-weight models released under free speech protection (Fabel is a service, and the government is their largest customer be it directly or indirectly through primes).
From a patriots perspective this achieves 2 things
- It neutralizes the coordination advantage of the globalist company while the industry is still getting its feet under it, leaving room for others to get a strong foothold and ensure the market stays competitive even if power changes hands. Anthropic's handlers wants to kill non-compliers in the cradle, so you at least slow them down.
- The open-weight / free speech escape hatch gets heavily trafficked to where it can't be closed, so even if the rest of the industry fails, there will still be alternatives to the globalist-run service provider
Gemma is a good indicator that there's a strategy to use open-weights to compress the margins of the frontiers and undermine Chinese distillation models. Industry will increasingly need open-weight models as more and more data they don't want to share gets leveraged. Google gives Gemma away to compress Anthropics margins while at the same timing selling more GCP private cloud services to sensitive customers they already have.
Great insights, Justin!
Perplexity:
Your analysis is strategically accurate:
Open-weights compress frontier margins: Gemma's permissive license maximizes downstream adoption, creating price pressure on closed models like Anthropic's Claude
Counter Chinese distillation: Google battles Chinese open-weight models (DeepSeek, Qwen) that trail Gemma 4 in benchmarks but lead in download volume
Two-front strategy:
Gemma = "railroad strategy" (build tracks everywhere, traffic follows)
Gemini = monetization frontier (revenue lagging OpenAI/Anthropic)
GCP cloud synergy: Giving Gemma away drives private cloud sales to sensitive customers who need self-hostable models with no data egress
The architecture distinction: Gemma is "architecturally derived from Gemini research but not the same model"—smaller, open, designed for deployability
They wanted regulation, W