Labs publicly defend open models, privately lobby against them — Jul 28

Nvidia rallies 35 companies into an Open Secure AI Alliance the same day Anthropic denies wanting an open-weights ban, hours after the New York Times reports Anthropic and OpenAI have been privately lobbying Washington to restrict Chinese open models. Claude Opus 5 tops day-one leaderboards but barely improves on a benchmark built to catch code-quality decay, and a $500 fine-tuned open model outperforms five frontier options on a real e-commerce task at a fraction of the cost. Kimi K3's open weights hit a hardware wall requiring Blackwell-class GPUs, while Google and Microsoft race to become the default AI layer inside a US national science initiative.