The Open Source AI Battle Shifts to Lobbying
Anthropic's recent public stance has not kept pace with the trend of "the entire industry embracing open source AI"; it continues to emphasize model safety and policy constraints.
A more realistic change is that AI companies' lobbying expenditures are rising, with OpenAI and Anthropic both listing copyright, cloud computing, cybersecurity, and defense procurement as policy issues.
In market mechanisms, the real battleground ahead is not about whether it can be called open source, but about defining rules around who can use it, who can contribute, how powerful the models can be, and whether safety barriers can be dismantled.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
Anthropic has historically positioned itself as part of the "more cautious safety faction," and in 2026, it changed its previously stricter safety commitments into a roadmap and report-style constraints, indicating a preference for gradual control in regulatory games.
In terms of capital pathways, the industry first expands the developer base through the consensus that "open source = innovation," and then rewrites the rules through safety, compliance, copyright, and national security issues; the higher the lobbying budget, the more it indicates that competition has shifted from the technical level to the institutional level.
This is analogous to the early standard wars of the internet: on the surface, it is about open protocols, but behind it is a struggle for control over entry, permissions, and compatibility by platforms.
Structurally, this indicates a regulatory change: open source AI will not be directly denied, but will gradually be subjected to licensing, liability, and access thresholds, resulting in "open source" still existing, but its openness may be fragmented.
ABAB News · Law of Cognition
First talk about openness, then change permissions.
Once rules are in place, open source will become stratified.
True control is not prohibition, but setting thresholds.