Rather than allow or ban open weights, rethinking access

I had just completed Frontier AI Governance course by BlueDot, and one of the newfound interest is about open weight models. I believe that open weights are important for the benefit of public and academia research [1] , and it helps us to improve further both AI capabilities and safety [2] . I also believe that there's a likelihood for high impact misuse risks (e.g. hacking and other offensive cyber capabilities) [3] . There is also the fact that open weights has risk of irreversible nature as safeguards can be removed and once the models are out it's practically impossible to retract them [4] . As low as the risk might be, disregarding it blindly in favor of open weights seems irresponsible. Here, I am writing my thoughts on it. This writing is made with what I took away from the course, and a rather quick research. TLDR; I think that providing public access to models is needed, but not entirely in the form of open weights. These are early thoughts. The wider, high level discussion landscape seems to still be mostly using a binary lens - either it's open weight or closed models [5] . Perhaps because it's simpler to imagine and understand, either it's on or off. But there's a advocates reaching for a separate view, looking it from an access viewpoint. I think this makes more sense. It's similar to how Identity and Access Management (IAM) goal is to give the right users get the right access to the right resources at the right time. It's also in a way similar to applying the…