Tommy Shaughnessy, a founding partner of Delphi Ventures, says the push by OpenAI and Anthropic to slow AI development is a defense of their business against cheaper Chinese open-source models.

“OpenAI and Anthropic want a regulatory moat because Chinese open source models are getting really good, and they’re not only really good, they’re really cheap to get 90% of the intelligence for a 10th the cost,” he said on Uneasy Money, recorded Sept. 16.

His comments follow Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei‘s Sept. 12 essay calling on the industry to slow the pace of AI progress, which OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said he agreed with the same day. Among the measures for China, the essay lists: “Crack down on unauthorized distillation by companies in authoritarian countries.”

Shaughnessy said on the show that the end game of the safety push is “Dario and Sam Altman in a room deciding the pace of intelligence, what you’re able to do, and that is not safety.”

The Distillation Fight

“The reality is China is way more innovation than distillation,” he said on the show. He pointed to an Aug. 26 report from Delphi Digital, the research firm he co-founded, which describes Chinese progress as coming “through legitimate contributions across quantization, attention architectures, MoE sparsity, and RL.” The NSA, CISA and FBI said in a Sept. 8 joint advisory that distillation is “the critical core” of model development at DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba and other Chinese companies.

Splitting the Bet

He asked the hosts whether they would rather put $100,000 into Anthropic and OpenAI or into what he called the open-source side: Palantir, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services and Meta. “I’m trying to figure out how to put money between the two baskets, and I’m like, if Democrats win, you wanna be safety,” he said on the show. He continued: “If Republicans win, you wanna be open source.”

Shaughnessy had posted the moat argument, the “innovation than distillation” line, the split between the labs and the open-source camp, and a line calling “Acceleration vs Safety” “the new Republican vs Democrat” on X between Sept. 13 and Sept. 15. Tying where to put money to which party wins was new on the show.

“I think everybody, every business and every person is gonna wanna own their AI architecture and stack,” he said on the show. He said he built a Hermes agent for Delphi Ventures on Nous Research’s software that holds his deal notes and the firm’s investment committee documents. Delphi is an investor in Nous Research, Shaughnessy has disclosed.

Related Listen: OpenAI Says It Cracked a Millennium Prize Problem. Why Is Anthropic Hitting the Brakes?