OpenAI vs. Anthropic: Why the AI Race Worries Researchers and Zuckerberg

Wired has published an analysis of the intensifying competition in the AI industry, pulling together three key worries: scientists warn that OpenAI and Anthropic are moving too fast, Mark Zuckerberg has raised the question of who will control AI, and Berlin-based startup Black Forest Labs has announced a move into robotics.

Why Researchers Fear the Pace of the Race

The scientific community's main complaint is that the two leading AI labs are scaling up capacity faster than our understanding of the safety of their systems is growing. According to critics, competitive pressure between OpenAI and Anthropic forces the companies to sacrifice caution for the speed of shipping new products and models. The anxiety grows with each release, as every new model is more powerful than the last, while unified industry-wide safety evaluation standards still do not exist. The absence of public independent audits is a particular concern: neither company discloses the full results of its pre-release checks.

As Wired reports, the research community is concerned that actual safety testing is in practice being shifted onto real users — after products ship rather than before. OpenAI and Anthropic set the pace not only for themselves but for the entire industry: smaller players have to follow the leaders to stay competitive. Notably, the criticism increasingly comes not only from academia but also from specialists working inside the industry itself.

Who Will Own Artificial Intelligence?

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, has raised a question that goes beyond simple safety concerns: who will ultimately control the planet's key AI infrastructure. Meta has consistently bet on its open Llama models as a systemic counterweight to the closed developments of OpenAI and Google. In Zuckerberg's logic, public availability of model weights reduces the risk of monopoly control over the technology.

"Open AI is the best outcome for the world" — this position from

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, has become a leitmotif of his public statements about the future of the AI industry; Wired regards it as the key alternative to the closed approach of OpenAI and Anthropic.

Critics, however, object that open weights also lower the barrier to abuse. In the context of the race between the two leading labs, Meta's position is not just a declaration of principles but also a competitive move: open AI strengthens the platform's ecosystem without Meta having to build its own closed monopoly. According to Wired, concentration of control over AI models is becoming an increasingly political issue — one discussed by both chief technology officers and regulators.

Black Forest Labs: From Image Generation to Robots

Berlin-based startup Black Forest Labs, which created the FLUX family of generative image models, is expanding into robotics, Wired reports. Black Forest Labs has become one of the key European providers of open image generation models. For a company that built its reputation in the niche of visual AI, moving into physical robotics is a significant strategic shift.

The move of generative startups into the physical world is becoming a steady trend: multimodal models are increasingly seen as the "intelligence" for robotic systems. Black Forest Labs is entering a space where the physical AI divisions of Google DeepMind, OpenAI, and a number of industrial partners already compete. For the Berlin startup, this is a bet on expanding beyond the image generation market — into the area where software models meet the real physical world.

What This Means

The competition between OpenAI and Anthropic is no longer an internal matter for the two labs. It is shaping the regulatory agenda, pushing Meta to redefine the rules through openness, and pulling new entrants like Black Forest Labs into the race. The question of the pace of development, and of who ultimately owns artificial intelligence, is moving from the technical sphere to the political one and will remain central for the industry for years to come.

*Meta is designated an extremist organization and banned in Russia.