Anthropic and Nvidia come out against blanket bans on open-weight AI models
As the United States government debates new artificial intelligence rules and regulations, Anthropic PBC and Nvidia Corp. are drawing a line against blanket bans on open-weight models, urging regulators to focus instead on specific risks and misuse.
An open-weight model is one where the developer releases its trained parameters, the “weights,” which are the numerical values and vectors learned during training that determine how a model behaves. These weights act like dials that can be adjusted to shape a model’s outputs and performance. Because they’re accessible, weights can be fine-tuned with proprietary data, letting developers customize the model for specialized purposes and use cases.
Open-weight models are released so that users and enterprise firms can run them locally or in their own cloud, eschewing the need to access frontier closed-source models built and deployed by big AI model developers such as OpenAI PBC or Anthropic.
Well-known examples of open-weight models include Meta Platforms Inc.’s Llama, Mistral AI SAS’s models, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s Qwen and DeepSeek’s models. All of these models let developers download, run and tune the weights directly.
