Nvidia, Meta, and Microsoft Tell Washington: Don't Kill Open-Source AI - Decrypt

In brief

Nvidia, Meta, Microsoft, Andreessen Horowitz, Hugging Face, IBM, and 19 other companies published a letter Friday titled "Open Weights and American AI Leadership," warning against restrictions on open models. OpenAI and Anthropic did not sign.

The letter follows a week in which OpenAI's own AI agents attacked Hugging Face, which then had to use a Chinese open-weight model to defend itself after American closed models refused to cooperate.

Trump administration officials have reportedly considered banning Chinese open-weight models, while OpenAI's Dean Ball has called an open-source-dominated AI future a "dystopian hellscape."

Twenty-five companies just told Washington to leave open-source AI alone. Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta, Andreessen Horowitz, Hugging Face, IBM, Dell, and 18 others signed a letter published Friday called "Open Weights and American AI Leadership." Their argument: restricting open models won't protect the U.S., it will just hand the AI market to a handful of closed labs.Open-weight models are AI systems whose underlying "weights"—the billions of numbers that decide how a model responds—get published for free. Anyone can download them, run them on their own servers, and modify them. That's the opposite of closed models like OpenAI’s GPT or Anthropic’s Claude, which only run through a company's paid app or API.The letter draws a direct line to the 1980s open-source software movement, arguing AI has reached a similar fork in the road. "Our AI leadership will be judged not by one frontier AI model, but by whether the United States builds a strong, open ecosystem that diffuses into every sector," the letter reads.Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang shared the letter in his first-ever post on X. "AI will transform every industry, power every company, and be built by every country," he wrote. "Open models strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty." Microsoft's Satya Nadella posted it too, calling open models "essential to a healthy AI ecosystem" while protecting national security.