Some of America’s biggest tech companies are telling Washington to pump the brakes on AI regulation, and they’re framing the argument in terms politicians can’t easily dismiss: national security.
Nvidia, Palantir, Microsoft, Meta, IBM, and a coalition of other firms signed a public letter to Congress in July 2026, pushing back against proposals that would restrict or outright ban open-weight AI models. Their core argument is straightforward. Closing off open AI development wouldn’t make America safer. It would make America slower.
The open-weight argument
Open-weight AI models let anyone inspect, modify, and deploy the underlying architecture without relying on a single vendor’s cloud or API. That distinction matters enormously for government and defense applications, where data sensitivity is paramount. Closed models from labs like OpenAI and Anthropic require users to send data through external systems. Open-weight alternatives let agencies keep everything in-house.
Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s CEO, framed it in blunt terms. He stated that open-source AI is foundational to national security, public safety, and US technology leadership.
