Jeffrey Dastin/Reuters
- Some of the biggest names in tech organized a full-throated defense of open AI models.
- On Friday, a combination of 25 companies, organizations, and platforms released an open letter.
- Among the signatories are Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta, and Mistral.
In his first-ever post on X, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang called attention to how some of the biggest names in AI and tech are rallying together to defend the future of open-weight AI models.
“AI will transform every industry, power every company, and be built by every country,” Huang wrote on X. “Open models strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty.”
On Friday, Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta, Mistral, and others signed an open letter that urges US policymakers not to crack down on open-weight AI models.
Their statement amounts to a full-throated endorsement of open-weight AI models at a time when top Trump administration officials have suggested they might take action against Moonshot AI, the creator of the Kimi K3, the world’s most powerful open-weight AI model.
“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 signatories wrote in the letter.
The two biggest absences in the list are OpenAI and Anthropic, widely viewed as the world leaders in the frontier AI model race. Unlike Anthropic’s Fable 5 and OpenAI’s GPT-5.6-Sol, Kimi K3 as an open-source model will soon be available for download and customization. Both companies would stand to gain if the US government either directly blocks or significantly impedes China-based open model makers like Moonshot AI. Other frontier AI developers, including SpaceXAI and Google, also did not sign onto the letter.
While the letter does not mention Moonshot specifically, its authors portray the broader development of open AI models as akin to how open software revolutionized computing in the 1980s.
“Open source did more than lower the cost of software; it created a shared foundation of knowledge on which generations of American engineers and entrepreneurs built their institutional sovereignty,” they wrote.
China has thus far dominated the development of open-weight AI models, despite the US’ legendary reputation in the creation of open-source software. Two of the biggest modern names in open software, Mozilla and the Linux Foundation, also signed onto the letter.
In the US, Nvidia’s Nemotron model is one of the largest open weight models, though its performance pales in comparison to rivals like Kimi K3. Alexandr Wang, chief AI officer of Meta, has said that his Meta Superintelligence Labs team remains committed to open models and is developing an open variant of its Muse Spark model. Reflection AI, a startup founded by former Google DeepMind researchers, is also preparing its own open model.
On Wednesday, Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, publicly accused Moonshot of developing Kimi K3 by distilling the model from Anthropic’s Fable 5. Distillation, the process of training a less powerful model on the outputs of a more powerful one, is a controversial but commonly used practice in AI development. At the same time, companies like Anthropic have accused their Chinese counterparts of abusing the distillation process to the point of essentially ripping off their intellectual property.
Earlier this week, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent suggested that the US could sanction companies that engage in such distillation, which he compared to theft.
The letter defends the distillation process more broadly, but does open the door to the possibility that companies like Nvidia, Microsoft, and Meta would support a crackdown on those proven to be bad actors.
“Unlawful efforts to extract value from closed models raise legitimate concerns,” they wrote. “Those concerns should be addressed through targeted legal and commercial frameworks rather than sweeping restrictions on techniques that play an important role in AI innovation.”
In total, a combination of 25 companies, organizations, and platforms signed on to the letter. They are the American Innovators Network, Andreessen Horowitz, Arcee AI, Arena, Black Forest Labs, Box, CrowdStrike, Dell Technologies, Emergence Capital, Hugging Face, IBM, The Linux Foundation, Mariana Minerals, Meta, Microsoft, Mistral, Mozilla, Nvidia, Palantir, Perplexity, Reflection, Replit, ServiceNow, Telnyx, and Y Combinator.
