Open-weight AI models are catching up to the frontier. The safety gap remains
As policymakers debate how to govern increasingly powerful AI systems like OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol and Anthropic’s Mythos, a Chinese open-weight model has narrowed the gap
As policymakers debate how to govern increasingly powerful AI systems like OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol and Anthropic’s Mythos, a Chinese open-weight model has narrowed the gap with the industry’s leaders. GLM-5.2, the open-weight AI model from China’s Z.ai, is only a few months behind OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 and Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.7 on cyber and bio capabilities, according to a new report from AI safety nonprofit SaferAI. But the divide between frontier capabilities and safety practices is growing. According to SaferAI’s evaluation, which the nonprofit ran via Z.ai’s public API, GLM-5.2 refused none of the offensive cyber or dual-use biology tasks it was given. By comparison, Claude Opus 4.7 “refused so consistently that SaferAI could not complete CyberGym on it at all.” (CyberGym is a benchmark that evaluates cybersecurity capabilities. OpenAI used it in the evaluation that preceded last month’s Hugging Face breach.) It’s a stark reminder of what some critics have warned for years: that open-weight AI models could put highly capable AI into the hands of potential attackers, with no way to police how they use the technology once they download the weights. With open-weight models rapidly approaching the capabilities of the world’s leading AI systems, the debate is moving from whether they can compete to how society manages risks once they are released. “The frontier of capability is not the frontier of risk, and so we do have to take into account the state of the mitigations as well to assess the risk properly,” Henry Papadatos, executive director of SaferAI, told TechCrunch. While Z.ai could apply safety measures to its hosted API, those protections become unenforceable once someone runs the weights on their own hardware, where they can remove or modify any safeguards, fine-tune the models, or change system prompts.
Frontier developers like OpenAI and Anthropic tend to rely on safeguards like classifiers, refusal training, and API-level controls to limit dangerous cyber and biological assistance. Those measures are far from foolproof: jailbreaks routinely bypass protections on deployed models. Far.ai, an AI safety nonprofit, found hundreds of universal jailbreaks — defined as reusable keys that succeed on most harmful requests — in frontier models like xAI’s Grok 4.5 and Google DeepMind’s Gemini 3.1 Pro. According to the report, jailbreaks succeed when attackers combine multiple manipulation techniques — including roleplaying, authority impersonation, fake conversation history, and follow-up prompts — to amplify weak points in a model’s defenses. But the safeguards in place for closed models don’t work at all on open-weight models, which are designed to run on any infrastructure with any set of safeguards — or lack thereof. “The objective should clearly be that the good capabilities — the safe ones — are accessible to anyone, and then we try to remove the bad ones, even in an open source fashion,” Papadatos said. One technique Papadatos noted could help is called “pre-training data filtering,” which is when an AI company removes offensive cybersecurity information from their training data and then trains the model on the curated dataset. Some research suggests this can reduce hazardous biological knowledge without harming overall model performance. However, for cybersecurity, data filtering is much less practical. It’s difficult to train a general model that excels at coding but isn’t also a good hacker. Because coding has become AI’s biggest moneymaker, developers face pressure to keep improving those capabilities even as they search for ways to limit misuse. Because of that, frontier developers have increasingly relied on other mitigations instead.
The BriefWire