Senate letter to Meta on LLaMA leak is a threat to open source AI at a key moment, say experts

…“Look, it’s easy for both government officials and proprietary competitors to throw open source under the bus, because policymakers look at it nervously as something that’s harder to control — and proprietary software providers look at it as a form of competition that they would rather just see go away in some cases,” Adam Thierer, innovation policy analyst at R Street Institute, told VentureBeat in an interview. “So that makes it an easy target…”

Thierer claimed that this is where the “politics of intimidation” come in. The Blumenthal/Hawley letter, he explained, is “a threat made to open source through what I’ll call a ‘nasty gram’ — a nasty letter saying ‘you should reconsider your position on this.’ They’re not saying we’re going to regulate you, but there’s certainly an ‘or else’ statement hanging in the room that looms above a letter like that.”

That, he says, is what’s most troubling. “At some point, lawmakers will start to put more and more pressure on other providers or platforms who may do business with or provide a platform for open-source applications or models,” he said. “And that’s how you get to regulating open source without formally regulating open source.”