A coalition of 25 technology companies and organizations has formed to advocate for open weight artificial intelligence models, with Microsoft, Nvidia, Meta, and 22 other organizations urging US policymakers to protect these systems from broad restrictions. According to the coalition's open letter published July 24, 2026, the signatories include major players such as Andreessen Horowitz, Hugging Face, IBM, The Linux Foundation, Mistral, Palantir, Perplexity and Y Combinator. The coalition argues that policymakers face a defining choice regarding the future of AI development, whether to embrace open weight models alongside proprietary systems or rely primarily on closed AI models. Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang and Microsoft Chief Executive Satya Nadella both shared the letter on their personal social media accounts, highlighting the industry's urgency. Huang emphasized that "AI will transform every industry, power every company, and be built by every country. Open models strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty." Elon Musk, who runs an AI business under his rocket company SpaceX, also applified the letter on social media, writing that it has his "full support" in a post on X, though SpaceX did not officially sign the letter. The letter specifically calls for targeted legal and commercial measures to address misuse instead of restrictions covering technologies that support legitimate AI development.
The coalition emphasizes that open weight models play a vital role in fostering innovation, research and competition in the AI sector. As outlined in the open letter, these systems are downloadable models that anyone can download, look over, change and run on their own infrastructure. The signatories argue that open weights allow startups, established businesses, universities and public institutions to use advanced AI without having to build models from scratch or pay frontier-model prices for each task. This approach enables organizations to reserve the largest models for the hardest problems while using cheaper, specialized systems for routine work, allowing customers to retain control of their data and deploy systems across preferred infrastructure. The letter specifically notes that relying only on closed models does not automatically improve safety, warning that such systems can still be breached, misused or fail in ways outsiders cannot detect. Nadella reinforced this position, stating that "The world needs both frontier closed models and frontier open models" and that open-weight models are essential to a healthy AI ecosystem. The coalition tied open weights to competition across model development, cloud infrastructure, chips and applications, with downloadable models allowing customers to reduce dependence on a single vendor. Rather than treating open and closed systems as rivals, the companies described both as necessary parts of the AI market, arguing that open models support competition, lower deployment costs and give developers more freedom to inspect or modify the technology they use.
The intervention comes as Chinese startup Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 model recently climbed to the top of Arena.ai's Frontend Code Arena leaderboard, outperforming several leading American models in real-world frontend development and agentic coding tasks. White House AI adviser Michael Kratsios confirmed on Wednesday that Moonshot AI developed Kimi K3 by distilling Anthropic's technology, while emphasizing that lawful distillation remains important to open innovation. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told CNBC earlier this week that the Trump administration will examine whether Chinese companies are stealing U.S. intellectual property, stating the government has the ability to sanction them if theft is confirmed. Bessent stated that officials would examine whether Chinese models had been trained through unauthorized use of outputs from U.S.-built systems, with sanctions and Entity List restrictions potentially applying if Chinese companies conducted industrial-scale distillation that crossed into intellectual-property theft. Kratsios acknowledged that legitimate AI distillation remains an important part of AI development but warned that "large-scale, covert industrial distillation aimed at stealing proprietary U.S. technology" is "unacceptable." The coalition acknowledges that developers lose control of model weights after release, while modified versions may be difficult to trace or reverse. However, they argue that prohibition would still be the wrong response because cybersecurity defenders need systems comparable to those available to attackers, with the letter stating that "In fact, openness may be one of the most important paths to AI safety and security." The coalition described distillation as a standard technique for improvement, evaluation and validation, while recognizing that unlawful extraction from closed systems raises legitimate concerns.
The joint letter represents a coordinated industry effort to influence US government policy on AI development, with the coalition calling on Washington to avoid "premature restrictions" on open-weight AI models that would "stifle competition or drive innovation overseas". According to the letter, the coalition argues that "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 initiative reflects growing industry consensus on the importance of open AI model standards in maintaining technological leadership, particularly as US officials consider measures involving Chinese AI laboratories and companies hosting their models. Nearly 200 Silicon Valley companies separately asked the Trump administration not to restrict access to Chinese open-weight models, as reported by POLITICO, with startups noting that inexpensive Chinese models can substitute for costly usage credits from U.S. providers. The appeal comes as governments around the world debate how best to regulate increasingly powerful AI systems while balancing innovation, national security and public safety. OpenAI and Anthropic, two companies focused mainly on proprietary models, do not sign the letter as both prepare for potentially large IPOs after confidential filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission in June. The omission of these companies from the coalition reflects an unusual split inside the AI industry, with companies building open-weight models increasingly seeing them as the best way to accelerate innovation and broaden AI adoption, while developers of proprietary frontier models have raised concerns about security, misuse, and intellectual property.
The companies warn that curbing open-weight AI models could harm domestic competition and drive innovation overseas amid global rivalry. The letter argues that concentrating advanced AI capabilities in a small number of proprietary models increases risk rather than reducing it. The industry frames the issue as part of a broader contest over whether the U.S. builds an open AI ecosystem that reaches every sector of the economy. OpenAI President Greg Brockman says the company supports broad access to AI and has not taken part in any discussions with the Trump administration about banning Chinese open-weight models. "I think that, that fundamentally, AI and AI usage is something that is actually very important to democratize," Brockman told reporters during a briefing in New York City. "And so, for me, at a sort of deep level, I think that having more models, more usage, that is a good thing." The coalition calls for distinguishing common development methods from unlawful extraction of value from proprietary models and addressing concerns through targeted legal and commercial frameworks, emphasizing that any concerns over unlawful distillation should be handled through targeted legal and commercial frameworks rather than sweeping limits. The debate has exposed this unusual split inside the AI industry, with companies building open-weight models increasingly seeing them as the best way to accelerate innovation and broaden AI adoption, while developers of proprietary frontier models have raised concerns about security, misuse, and intellectual property.
