Twenty-five American technology companies, venture firms and open-source foundations signed a joint letter on Friday asking Washington to leave open-weight AI models alone, arguing that America’s lead in artificial intelligence will be settled by how far the technology spreads rather than by who builds the single best model. Microsoft, Meta, Nvidia, Dell Technologies, IBM, Palantir, Mistral, Mozilla, the Linux Foundation, Hugging Face, Andreessen Horowitz and Y Combinator are among the names on it.The letter lands in the middle of a fight. The letter arrives while senior Trump administration officials weigh action against Moonshot AI, the Chinese startup whose Kimi K3 model has beaten American systems on several benchmarks this month. The signatories want policymakers to avoid “premature restrictions” that would, in their words, stifle competition or push innovation overseas. Their broader claim is sharper still: openness may be one of the most important paths to AI safety and security, not a threat to it.
Why 25 American tech companies are defending open-weight AI models right now
Open-weight models are the ones anyone can download, inspect, modify and run on their own servers. The letter argues that closed models are not automatically safer, since they can be breached or fail in ways nobody outside the company can see. Concentrating frontier capability behind a handful of providers, the signatories write, creates a small number of single points of failure.The letter also leans on history, drawing a straight line from the open-source software movement of the 1980s to today’s argument. Mozilla and the Linux Foundation, two survivors of that era, both signed.
Jensen Huang, Satya Nadella and Michael Dell take the argument to social media
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang used his first-ever post on X to share it, writing that open models strengthen safety and cybersecurity while enabling sovereignty. Microsoft’s Satya Nadella framed it as a path that protects national security rather than weakening it. Michael Dell said long-term leadership needs choice across the full ecosystem.Elon Musk, whose AI business sits under SpaceX, backed the letter without signing it. “This has my full support,” he posted.
OpenAI, Anthropic and Google are the names missing from the list
The three biggest closed-model developers in the US stayed out. Both OpenAI and Anthropic are valued near $1 trillion and have confidentially filed for IPOs that could land this year. Both would benefit if Washington restricted Chinese open models. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman still posted that he was glad to see the letter and wants the US to win in open source and proprietary models alike.The unresolved fight is distillation, the practice of training a smaller model on a stronger one’s outputs. White House OSTP director Michael Kratsios accused Moonshot on Wednesday of building Kimi K3 by distilling Anthropic’s Fable 5. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent went further on Tuesday, comparing it to theft and raising the prospect of sanctions.The letter defends distillation as a normal development technique while conceding that unlawful extraction from closed models is a real problem. Its fix is narrower than a ban. Those cases, it says, belong in targeted legal and commercial frameworks rather than sweeping rules that catch legitimate research in the same net.
