When Australia announced plans to regulate artificial intelligence, the loudest applause came from two American companies: OpenAI and Anthropic. It might seem odd for Silicon Valley darlings to welcome limits on their freewheeling industry, but their support has less to do with Canberra and more with a much bigger game. Both firms lost billions in implied market value this week after a Chinese startup, Moonshot AI, launched an open-source model called Kimi K3 that competes directly with their own proprietary systems. The model allows users to modify it freely, unlike Anthropic’s Claude or OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and demand was so high Moonshot had to pause new subscriptions.
The timing is critical. Anthropic has started registering to list on US stock markets, following SpaceX’s path to a $2.1 trillion valuation after its public debut. But Chinese competition and a $1.5 billion settlement with authors—including Australia’s assistant technology minister Andrew Charlton—don’t make for a compelling investor story. Charlton argues that Australia’s new rules, which require tech companies to pay creators for training data, could actually benefit big tech. “If we are upfront with what we expect, we can give clarity to investors,” he said. Morningstar analyst Malik Ahmed Khan agrees: knowing where regulation is headed makes it easier to invest and easier to sell high-priced shares to investors wary of legal risks.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese hopes to set a global precedent, just as Australia did with social media bans for under-16s. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has called for a coalition of democracies to dominate AI and block China, while also pushing for domestic testing and blocking of models that pose “unacceptable risks.” Critics note the timing is convenient for a company nearing its IPO, but Grattan Institute CEO Aruna Sathanapally, who met Amodei in Canberra, says his concerns appeared genuine. “Just because they have vested interests doesn’t mean the calls for regulation are not well founded,” she said. “You just need to keep competitive neutrality in how you design it.”
Source: The Guardian