Anthropic is funding 5 open-source models — including a safety-focused one

Anthropic dropped a $10M fund for open-source models this week. Five projects got in: Llama, Mixtral, Qwen, Granite, and a model called Mythos built for safety evals.

The money is going to the labs building the models, not to independent researchers. Anthropic's boss Dario Amodei is the one pushing this. He's been saying for a while that open models are catching up on capability and that the world needs more of them — especially ones that can test other models for safety.

Mythos is the odd one out. It's a 14B parameter model made for evaluating safety, not for running tasks. The idea is that if everyone's shipping open models, you need open tools to check whether they're actually safe before they get used in the wild.

Anthropic's own Claude is closed-source. The company has been careful about what it releases — its open weights so far are the smaller Claude 3 Haiku and the older Sonnet variants. This fund is a way of seeding the open ecosystem with models the company trusts, including one it built itself for safety testing.

The open-model race is heating up. Meta's Llama, Mistral's Mixtral, Alibaba's Qwen, and IBM's Granite are all competing. Anthropic is throwing money at the field to make sure the safety layer doesn't lag behind the capability layer.

Why this matters for us: open models keep the power out of the hands of companies that lock everything down — when the tools are open, la gente can audit what's actually running, not just trust a privacy policy.