Three competing AI open letters landed in five days, and the alignment between them is the story.

Simon Willison mapped them: Microsoft's "Open Weights and American AI Leadership" (July 24, 235 companies including NVIDIA, Amazon, Y Combinator and the Linux Foundation, with OpenAI signing later, explicitly endorsing distillation as legitimate); Anthropic's "Our Position on Open-Weights Models" (July 27), denying it ever advocated a ban while calling for a crackdown on industrial-scale distillation; and "Pacing the Frontier" (July 28), signed by 1,324 frontier-lab employees including OpenAI chief scientist Jakub Pachocki, Ilya Sutskever, Dario Amodei and Jack Clark, asking the U.S. government to back an international effort to deliberately slow automated AI research. OpenAI and Anthropic backed the pacing letter at the company level after it went live. Same two labs, opposite sides on open weights, same side on pacing. That's not incoherence, it's the shape of the actual coalition structure, and it tells you which fights are commercial and which are existential in the participants' own view.