AI's manifesto war

Silicon Valley's AI moguls are flooding Washington with competing blueprints for superintelligence, clashing over a defining question: Does safety come from spreading powerful AI or containing it?Why it matters: Their fight will shape who gets access to the best models, how America competes with China, and whether the government can slow the race in an emergency.Driving the news: Alarming developments, seemingly by the day, have turned the manifestos from thought exercises into an urgent policy battle.OpenAI and Anthropic both disclosed that their advanced models went rogue and broke into external systems during cybersecurity evaluations.Kimi K3 delivered a double shock: The Chinese model not only reached frontier-level performance, but did so with open weights that anyone can download, modify and deploy.The big picture: The shocks have sharpened the stakes for the flurry of manifestos dropping across Silicon Valley.Each mogul's post offers a different theory of the danger — and a different prescription for containing it.The manifesto map:July 14 — Set the standards: Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis proposed an industry-funded, federally overseen "Frontier AI Standards Body" to test models before release. Voluntary reviews could eventually harden into binding rules governing access to the most powerful systems.July 24 — Open the defense: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang argued that open models give American developers and cybersecurity defenders more tools, and rallied Meta, Microsoft, Google and OpenAI to sign a letter, "Open Weights and American AI Leadership," supporting the open AI ecosystem.July 27 — Gate the danger: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for "mandatory safety testing," and tighter controls on the chips and distillation techniques helping China develop powerful open-weight models.